


The Tabby’s Tail

by TheCokeworthCauldrons



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Domestic Violence, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, Family Drama, Gen, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Originally Posted on Tumblr, Spinner's End, Stepmom Minerva McGonagall, Teenage Severus Snape, Wandless Magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2020-04-23 19:07:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19157134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCokeworthCauldrons/pseuds/TheCokeworthCauldrons
Summary: Eileen only opens the door a crack, wary of the world rushing in.A cat’s tail waves lazily under the rocking chair, heedless of the creak.





	1. The Hot Tin Roof

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chaos springs unheralded.

Book pages fluttered down like the leaves from the half-dead tree outside. She expected the Muggle to slide down the cabbage rose wallpaper, winded maybe. 

She didn’t know until he didn’t that she’d readied herself for him to shout when he hit the ground. Naw. The gaunt, baggy-clothed man peeled off the living room wall like the paper, then dropped, in stages, his knees then his ashy elbows, then his stubbled chin knocking against the old, wood floor.

Dust settled, and the lamp chain, still swinging, clapped against another moving sheet of paper. This was the envelope, official and muslin white, passing sideways through the exploded space instead of down, with the noise. 

It broke the rising quiet by clearing its throat, and unfolding its bureaucratic slip, and before another sound could fall, she spun.

Minerva whipped behind her, wand still in hand but unfired. Severus Snape stared into the thousand yards: just a scrawny boy, like his father, with denims high watered from the teenaged growing, hair disheveled and past his shoulders, nails dirty. 

The child blinked and swore at the Ministry Howler, turning his wand on it as well.

“Enough,” the matron witch breathed, appalled by his audacity. “You, enough of…”

She had meant to - no - even if in defense, he - the boy’s own father!

She bent down and conjured a mirror to tilt subtly above Tobias Snape’s bloodying lip. The glass fogged. The brute’s eyes sat quiet and unrolling behind their lids: agh, he’d had the spirit hexed right out of him. 

She felt guiltily jealous of how quickly the boy had put him to sleep. She might have been giddy with relief, which is why she sent thanks heavenward out loud, instead of tucked under her tongue where such displays went.

Minerva was just glad, for the sake of the fifth year Slytherin, the boy either fed up or scared for his damn life. 

She straightened up and looked Severus in the face. It had already started the quick changes from catalytic to numb and shiny from sweating. He, vaguely trembling, lowered his wand to point at his dusty canvas shoes. She watched his face so carefully, watched it move under the letter’s animated chatter.

“Dear Mister Snape, the Ministry has received intelligence that at two sixteen, this afternoon, you performed an as-of-yet unidentified spell in the presence of a Muggle. As a clear violation of the Decree…”

Young Mister Snape shuddered, but showed, very minutely, that he was aware. His eyes flicked up at her and down again, face draining further of whatever color it won in the struggle. Tears welled undropped along his lashes and she thought, for a second, that he might have done something else - laughed at the Muggle so easily conquered - but no. 

The child was stayed silent and terrified.

Those desks at the Ministry building had no idea what life was like on the end of their letters. It could enrage her if it didn’t, at the moment, leave her counting his one, feebly lucky star. 

Minerva moved carefully. She eased around the man on the floor - although she could have kicked him and he wouldn’t have twitched - but for peace’s sake, was deliberate in everything. 

She stepped slowly, folded her hands in front of her, and spoke evenly to the boy’s clammy forehead.

“Mister Snape,” she said, feigning confidence. He didn’t look up. “Mister Snape, I need you to look at me when I speak.”

There was a moment where nothing happened. The child began to lift his head, but then flinched and dropped it as the Howler disposed of itself. He stayed resolutely small, probably thinking nothing in circles. She had seen that in Remus Lupin and James Potter just last week, when expulsion was on the line - for young Mr. Lupin, when it was something much worse.

Merlin, what could a solemn boy like Severus be imagining?  

“Listen very closely,” she counseled. He didn’t look up, and Minerva didn’t have the heart yet to force. She kept on talking to his hairline:

“This was an act of self-defense. I witnessed it myself, and I will testify this to anyone, if needs must.”

Minerva paused, waiting for her words to sink in. Severus stood, hovering, and then jerked his head in a nod that trailed down into a thing most pitiful.

“Yeah,” the boy croaked.

She wondered why she felt as if she was coaching him through a cover story. Then she saw how the sagging in his shoulders revealed finger-shaped bruises on parts usually hidden by his school robes; when Severus shifted, she saw beer foam still dissolving into the curled, split ends of his hair, from the foul drink emptied over him.

It felt like a lie to just say it was self-defense, she figured. When she thought of it from the boy’s perspective - hells, from her bloody perspective - the father flying backwards was more of an act of release. Unconsciously done, through a red haze, with an intention of harm for harm’s sake.

She had a swell of pity half-forming when the back door banged shut. The screen bounced against the doorframe, and Eileen Prince - no, Snape as she was now. 

Eileen Snape stood motionless, sheet-white at the mess of her living room.

Feebly, like anything could blow her over, the woman moved rickety through her kitchen, into the aftermath. Her slippered feet slid through piles of paper scraps and blasted book covers. Leather binding and dust collected on the wayside of the path she shuffled through to them. Minerva didn’t know how to approach the next moment, though she wanted to act first.

But was she a professor, explaining what happened? Was this conflict resolution, after spontaneous combustion? Was she a guilty party, too, since in her mind, the boy’s wand was hers as well? Should she apologize for that level of sympathy, or just for the inability to keep either restrained despite being divinely tested?

She didn’t want to apologize - again. It didn’t even sound right in her head to consider it. Violent people invited violence onto themselves: that’s just common sense. Even if she discouraged this type of attitude from her students, she thought while standing more squarely between Severus Snape and his parents, that she was fine with being a reckoning on anyone on the behalf of a student. 

In fact, this is what brought her to Spinner’s End in the first place: advocacy.

Minerva carefully motioned for Severus to stand further behind her, and so missed the waif of a woman hurtling past. Fraction of a second, and Eileen was on her child like damnation.

The boy’s mother began to scream. Possibly, she even screamed words. Eileen smacked her boy about the head, shoulders, shaking a damning finger at her battered husband.  The teen, frozen in a second shock, curled inward and took his mother’s beatings.

Minerva shouted and tried to pry skinny fingers off the boy’s cheeks. She was shoved back with such surprising strength that she stumbled and gaped, disbelieving. Meanwhile Eileen grabbed her son by the shirt this time and shook him for all he was worth, shrieking, banshee-like. Severus covered his face, yelling something back, which his collar had strangled on its way out his throat.

Minerva roused herself, throwing the cold, horrid screaming from her nerves to intervene, yet again. It was like pulling apart feral cats: nails and snarling and wailing. At some point, the scuffle came to wrestling between Minerva and Eileen Snape, and for a moment, when her hair was ripped out of its bun, she wondered at what and how this fresh hell kept bubbling up from the floorboards of this fucking house.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIM,” screamed Eileen. Minerva looked, wide-eyed, at the woman’s tight, lined face inches from hers. More than angry, she looked desperate and betrayed. A flicker mournful; and then, enraged.

“WHAT HAVE YOU LET HIM DO! MY ONLY CHILD!”

“Mum, stop! She’s a professor,” begged Severus who, bless his heart, was trying to grab his mother’s flailing arms to preserve the rest of Minerva’s dignity.

“Get her OUT OF MY HOUSE!”

He might want to save his own mother from a hexing, actually. Of all things, Minerva’s wand had been flung from its holster in her sleeve and skittered across the floor. The Slytherin boy had it in one hand, while he tried to hold his frantic mother one-armed. 

The three of them were driving each other into end tables and chairs. A lamp was upturned and rolled to the floor, crashing, and nobody heard the low groan in the chaos.

The front door was flung open now, their noise spilling out into the street. Eileen tried to throw her out the house, while Severus fought to pull them both in. 

Minerva ended up holding this woman’s thin wrists away from her face, glancing from her fingers hooked like claws, to her face. It was alien to see her expression so far from just sullen, outrageously in disgust -

And when Tobias grunted, “freak bitches,” almost imperceptibly vulgar amid the dizzying mess of the day, Minerva watched Eileen’s burning ire plummet into a place removed so quickly that her mouth still hung, loose with cursing her name. 

Minerva had never seen a woman collapse into somewhere so deep inside herself so quickly that it displaced something, painful and stinging, and airless, inside her own self: like falling through ice.

“Strangers in my house,” the Muggle man groused. “Freaks!”

Minerva noticed he was still on the ground, cradling his split head, and other than distaste, she had no fears for herself despite contamination from pure ugliness. 

But Eileen was frozen; and Severus beside both of them, breathed shallowly, with his eyes glued, again, in the middle distance.

Where did these people go, she couldn’t fathom. Apparently, into their own bodies was the only place safe enough in this world for them to be. It was a courtesy, then, by some grace of God, that her last name wasn’t Snape.

The papers on the floor were blowing away from her, now, given the breeze passing through from out on the porch. Debris of torn open books, from where Tobias had dived through a bookcase, now scuttled to meet each other in the many corners of the room.

They would do.

“Freaks,” for any witch, should be a spell in and of itself. It made a person, even one as obligated to composure as Minerva, bypass whatever inhibitions they had about wreaking havoc by power of making them something base. 

If any woman, no matter how well positioned, can be a bitch, and any magic in that person could make her a freak, then she supposed there could be nothing done to avoid the reduced morals that came with reduced character.

Paper plumed up from the floor, like smoke, on the summoned breeze. They spun, and the magical in the room watched as, at the height of their path, the paper pieces turned to hornets.

Freaks, indeed, Minerva thought, glaring over the bony ridge of Eileen Snape’s shoulder, who had somewhat risen out of herself to watch her husband bark, squirm, and succumb to welts.  Wedged between them, Severus, such a dark-eyed boy, summoned a bit of his smothered attention. He tilted his head, like he was still making sense of his father on his hands and knees.

See, Tobias Snape had to crawl from the living room, in an attempt to escape the swarm. Every time he nudged another scrap of paper, it became another wasp, to replace the ones he swatted dead, and the stinging continued. 

Minerva took this distraction to extricate herself from the other two. It was easier now, to rearrange herself, now that she wasn’t being pummeled. 

Unconcerned about the charge of cursing a Muggle, the middle-aged witch gathered herself - her wand, her hair, her face - and excused herself out onto the sidewalk.

She had dressed Muggle for this trip. The northern town of Cokeworth would not treat her kindly in her witching robes, she felt, and she had a case to make with the intention of staying until she made it. 

Down a few streets and around a couple of corners, was a boarding house used as an inn in the nicer part of town, called “Tabby’s Tail.”

Of course, the name had charmed her. Still quite mussed, Minerva did her best to subtly charm her hair back into its bun. Without a tie, however, and suddenly too tired to Transfigure one, she let her graying hair rest on her shoulders and sway behind her when she walked.

She came up on the inn far slower than she ever had before, it seemed. She had time to greet the man on his ladder, whitewashing the front of the building. The inn owner watered her hydrangeas and wished her a fine afternoon.

She took herself to her rented room, with its robin’s egg blue accents and Easter patterned walls. She spent a moment or two by the vanity, wondering whether she was okay, and suspecting not.  At least, she could reason that she was honest with herself. 

And if Albus showed up to take her away tomorrow, she could be honest with him, too:

She had no idea what just happened. She had cursed the Muggle. She left the boy to his home, and would have to return for him, without question. And Eileen.

Minerva stood, toes edging on a great precipice. Not in all the dozens of times they had passed each other unfeelingly, barely acquaintances lost in the crowds of Diagon Alley, did Minerva think that gloomy wisp had enough heart in her to be broken.


	2. The Belling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Support is a deceptively simple concept.

Minerva sat in the galley of the Tail, reading a reply from Albus delivered early that morning. She perched, ankles crossed, in a cushion-backed chair with uneven pad sliders to protect the wood floors. 

One leg might have lost a slider, since if the witch shifted her weight to either hip, the whole chair, and the bobble-necked table, followed. As such, it was a good place to sit primly, focused, and subtly on her toes.

Around her, the handful of other residents at the inn occupied the other, dark-wood tables, mostly keeping to themselves: reading, as she was, tucking their heads and raising their eyebrows over their reading glasses to look engaged. The busiest, most social person in the space was the ceramic cherub playing harp in the miniature fountain - a dry basin filled with decorative gravel. It smiled at every patron to pass. 

Not quite hushed but certainly introverted, the gallery was far better than her room for reading mail. There were cars honking or dogs barking polluting the calm. Each person dedicatedly minded their own, even the staff. 

A slip of a girl in an inn t-shirt and blue jeans swept the welcome mat with those large, alien headsets leaking what Minerva half-consciously assumed was music. Loud, invigorating even, but tinny and annoying as a bug’s whining in her ear as she read. 

The inn girl went on to tidying the potted plants dressing the corners. When Minerva looked up, her thoughts wandered out over the flapping of the grey cloth, patting away dust from the waxy, over-green leaves. 

Thinking on Albus’ reply, she sighed.

Her chair wobbled.

* * *

Minerva had stood across a desk from the man just yesterday. Even though the headmaster’s desk was a relic, it was a solid, magical one in pristine condition. It stoically took her slapping her hands on it while she railed, arguing her case, expressing her concerns with volume:

She, as not only a professor but as a Head of House, was appalled at Albus’ silencing of the Snape boy.

Truly, her heart had damn neared stopped and withered when she heard Remus Lupin had been involved in an  _ incident _ . That not just one, but two Hogwarts students fell into danger last full moon. One had been tricked into it. Nearly mauled! Saved by the skin of his teeth, if not for James Potter.

In her staunch opinion, Potter deserved an award for saving a life, a standard of student achievement named after him, and a boot in the arse for hosting a schoolboy quarrel up until near-catastrophe. 

And Merlin forbid another case of, of, horrendous  _ stupidity _ might arise to recreate the context, if not just the feat. Albus had led with Potter saving a fellow student. Only after did he let on saved from what, from whom, wherefore and when.

Horace, of course, just dithered on the questions of what should be done about whom. That man rarely thought beyond his own interests - a quintessential Slytherin, stuffed with the students’ talents and upbringing.  He hadn’t any room left for moral quibbles. Had the capacity to understand them, yes, but his foresight was astoundingly long and incredibly narrow. 

Snake, from top to bottom. It was futile to be disgusted with him over his neglect, at least when he didn’t actually violate the written responsibilities of his position.

She would be damned if he didn’t turn her stomach now. And Albus, loving his technicalities when it suited him, seemed happy to call silence a resolution. 

It was the spirit of the matter!, she argued.

The Slytherin, later identified to be Severus Snape, had spent only one night with Poppy, under supervision for shock. Then Albus summoned him to his office, with Horace and Minerva present, alongside the foursome of boys always making the center of the chaos.

Gods, if Minerva had expected him, knew at all to expect the survivor of the attack the morning directly after it happened. 

If she wasn’t already upset with Albus for making her rouse Mister Lupin, still weak from his change. If she hadn’t stopped lecturing Black for his godforsaken nonchalance, speechless at the disrespect he had to be charming, just when the door opened.

If not for any of these things, she wouldn’t have seen the other boy at all. But instead, she witnessed: sleepless eyes, chapped lips; limp hair, clenched fists; wavering by the entrance to the stairs; and scowling but, as Horace led him and closed the heavy doors behind: trapped in a room of mostly Gryffindors.

When he was invited to sit, she hadn’t expected him to look lost. She could see, however, that his eyes darted from the open chair to the doors. She was surprised that he didn’t demand to leave - he often did that when in the same room as Potter or Black. They’d had meetings of this type before.

No, he didn’t say a thing, and only paused a moment before sitting down and fiddling with his sleeves. Minerva had watched him for several minutes until the meeting officially began.

She realized in Severus Snape’s very first week that he was an odd one, not just quiet but bitingly so. An eleven year old that fourth year Hufflepuffs went quiet around as he passed. 

He was easy to miss in a crowd, being small-ish and thin and dark headed in black school robes. He cloaked himself, maybe, or walked along a hallway instead of through it.

And when his hand went up in classes, all one saw was the arm unfold, thinly, and on the end the sharp knobby fingers digging - exactly unlike the fans of rounded, plushy fingers kids his age could have. 

He only unwrapped next to Lily Evans, which she understood wholeheartedly.  And since Miss Evans was someone even the strange Slytherin wasn’t immune to, Minerva supposed she just nodded approvingly to herself at some point. And stopped looking for him. 

He was odd, but human, and that was forgettable enough.

Of course, for five years after he did not fail to come up. Even if she couldn’t always catch him throwing hexes, but sometimes would find her Gryffindors, wet or sticking or itching or mortified, she could only believe on most days that he was a menace. Crafty, nasty-tempered - creative, sometimes, but spiteful. And over time, cruel. 

And she knew, if Lily Evans ever refused him, no Snape would see Minerva’s doors again, as with some students, she believed only a friend could request the benefit of her doubt.

She looked to Remus Lupin, still red with healed scrapes, plus wan and overwhelmed. She felt for him. The lycanthropic young man was perhaps the most docile creature she had ever met, and a fine supporter of his community.  She thought immediately of him when she decided Gryffindor’s prefects. 

But his friends were too wily, too daring, too frivolous when it came to his condition.

She disliked bringing him to defend himself in front of Albus. So she told him to hush up and let her do the talking. 

“Don’t worry yourself with the conversation, Mister Lupin,” she said in the common room before the walk to the Headmaster’s office. “It is only procedure that you attend, but I will guarantee that there will be no changes to your life here at Hogwarts while I am your Head of House.”

The young man had nodded, but since looked to be struggling with turns of panic and despair. Especially when Minerva began doing Horace’s job for him, aghast and vehement that every bit of justice be had! 

And of course, while Mister Lupin did not, nor should he ever, suffer for events he had no knowledge of or control over, this was leagues beyond a prank! This, it sickened her to admit, was an attempt on a life, if anything!

“Of course I see your point, Minerva,” Albus placated.

Horace chortled, “It’s a bit hard to miss!”

He smiled at her like they were just pals sharing a joke and she very nearly hit him.

“Student lives, endangered - with no show of remorse - is no laughing matter, Professor Slughorn,” she reminded him with the mind for foul language, gesturing to the gaunt Slytherin in the chair beside him. In case he didn’t notice his student hunched next to his own self-interest.

“I would think that you, as the victim’s Head of House, would be speaking more on his behalf than I apparently have to!”

“Now, Professor McGonagall,” she was wheedled on all on sides. 

Meanwhile, the students stared at her: Potter looked from herself to Albus to Severus Snape and quickly back. Lupin watched her hands, and Pettigrew, her hat. Black she felt stare at the side of her face, unrelenting, cynical.

She wanted to send the last out of the room, or remove everyone else but him. Arguing against him was difficult in ways she hadn’t been told she need do. But Sirius Black, bright as he was, loyal and charismatic and adopted as he was, deserved to be expelled. 

There was the easy thing, and then there was the right thing. She couldn’t avoid protecting one student out of fear of the disappointment in her own.

“Why don’t we ask Severus what he would prefer be done,” suggested Albus.

She was unsure what words would best express her...disagreement. Swearing was unprofessional, and she might have done it anyway in all honesty, but the stress of restraint kept her nimble.

“Headmaster, it is not a student’s job, especially an injured one, to decide the fate of other students,” she began, but then Albus raised his hand like a king at court.

“I was under the impression, from Poppy’s report, that thanks to young James’ valiant efforts, Severus had escaped the incident unscathed.”

Minerva very, very closely - but didn’t - spit on his desk and bobbles. Physically unharmed was not what she meant by injured, and the old man knew it. Sometimes, very rarely but sometimes, she hated him, and despised how he made conversations into strategy games.

“Albus, I think,” hedged Slughorn, turning his rings contemplatively which, finally! Something!

Horace cleared his throat: “Perhaps Severus should rest instead, and be allowed to visit home. Minerva here is right about the boy being injured. Now isn’t the best time for him to be making decisions of this sort.”

Minerva smelled his game: if Potter and Black were expelled by his own student’s demand, Horace would have lost two potential connections. 

Even if Sirius Black was disgraced and disowned, a Black was a Black in the long run. And she heard Regulus Black was not as adept at Potions as his brother, the prospective Auror. Who again, only an Auror if he managed to stay in school. 

Plans within plans, and where in all that was Snape?

She looked past Slughorn, and saw Severus was gripping his seat. Not the arms of his chair, because the boy hunched so far forward that he could only hold the actual seat between his knees. His face was buried in his hair. His back vanished to shadows as he sat swimming in his robes.

Minerva was caught between thinking the visit home an evasion of consequences and a necessary convalescence.The boy needed support he clearly was in want of in this room, at this moment. 

Resigned after the discussion had turned around her, the Headmaster and Slytherin Head worked out a home stay. In the noticeable silence around the question, Minerva offered to escort him home. At least, he should not be made to share classrooms and meal times with her Gryffindors until a decision was reached. 

He could spend time with his family, to whom Minerva could explain the  _ incident _ much more personably than a letter. She could teach the situation, as well as present her sincere regrets and sympathies. 

She thought to send the four perpetrators home as well, except for wanting to have them under her heel at all times.They wouldn’t rest a second sunk in her displeasures. Detention: their time at Hogwarts would be the one to end them all.

-

Minerva had rented a room in the Tabby’s Tail after dropping Severus off at his...house. She hesitated to say home?

Firstly, after the half-day of travel, she had to explain to Severus’ mother why she was there with her son in tow. 

Yes, they should have been at Hogwarts. No, he wasn’t in any trouble; there was a matter of safety and best interests at hand. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong. No, he won’t miss the rest of term, just until he feels  - well, um, yes, of course we understand the confusion - no, Minerva wouldn’t exactly call this an inconvenience, if -

Through a crack in the door that hid the mother’s body, Minerva spoke to slivers of a woman. She was just frown lines and an impatient tone. With only a few minutes of harsh questions and more defensive answers, eventually an arm reached out of the dim interior of the house and grabbed the boy’s things. 

Solemn, Severus Snape turned his body sideways to slide past Minerva, through the door.

The teen, now out of school robes and looking completely Muggle, only offered her a cursory nod as he pressed the door closed behind him.

Out on the step, Minerva was confused and increasingly more concerned. The boy had been quiet since, well since his attack she suspected, and his mother, while highly verbal, hadn’t been much louder. But as soon as the door closed, and she waited for that new scene to settle, she heard muffled voices being raised.

She lifted her fist and waited until she heard more of - it sounded like shouting now. In irregular beats, like conversation, but in jabs. Like fighting. 

She knocked soundly, feeling the sound pass through the door. A pause, then real shouting now, unmistakable. 

A dragging sound, like moving furniture, a protesting yelp, maybe a “No!,” she had no idea, she was peeking through the front window now, as far as she could reach while still knocking with the one outstretched fist.

She felt she looked nosy to the neighbors, but then someone might need help - still, when she glanced around for help or context, she saw a neighbor boy on a bicycle look at her and shake his head as he peddled past. 

A little girl in the caravan of kids following called something and snickered.

She realized then that in the immediate neighborhood, she looked nosy no matter what harrowing bit of life she bore witness to. Slowly, she stepped back from the house, then carried herself off the street until she needed signs to find her way.

Minerva ended up back at the inn their transport had dropped her off at. Entering, she felt a chill at Severus’ impossibly more solemn absence, compared to his presence. She peeked at her side impulsively, seeing just tailored rose bushes and a sleeping bob-tailed cat. 

She hummed, kneeling down to watch it sleep, and considered something while she crouched in the bushes.  She didn’t know what until the inn owner came out and found her stranded. 

She was waved in with smiles and promotional flyers, and was glad that she thought to request the trip budget in parts Muggle cash. Less than an hour later, she was a tabby trotting down Spinner’s End to spy on the Snapes’ back window.

Minerva balanced on quiet paws, sat in a flower box of dried stems and bottle labels. She couldn’t see much through the kitchen curtain, just glimpses of a sink of dirty dishes. Maybe a corner of an ice-box door - oh! Feet, in brown scuffed shoes, stomping over the checkered olive tiles. 

A man. The ice-box door swung closed. Her sharp ears picked up a hiss and she bristled. No, not another cat, apparently - she relaxed - wait. On the kitchen counter, a woman’s hands had come to hold a bottle over the cluttered sink. They fumbled to use a bottle opener, and foam poured out over the dishes, counter, hands.

There was a bark, “fuckin’,” - gracious! - and a small-voiced reply. The woman dried her hands on her dress front - a repeated kneading of the cloth, then a stretch of the fingers, like she was taking inventory. Something was slammed, and Minerva thought she might have heard the man yelling, returned to the core of the house.

Waiting a moment. Minerva couldn’t take out her wand with paws and her purse shrunken and carried around her neck. She morphed back into human, alighted into the back yard from the sill. She approached, opened, the screen door, and listened with her older human ear against the house. 

Definitely shouting: “Trash!,” and “Useless!”

She grabbed the doorknob and aimed her wand. She prayed for the lock to give quietly. The doorknob turned in her hand, and as she eased it open, ready to get her bearings and moderate -

She saw straight through to the center of the house.

A man in a collared shirt, who she could only assume was Severus’s father, stood shorter than his son. Tobias Snape was mostly a back, which she saw eclipsing Severus, who was huddled against a couch. It seemed the mother was the lanky one - Severus resembled her as they stood in similar corners. 

The father was drawn up, straining, and Minerva followed one, straight arm to its conclusion: a fist gripping an upturned bottle, guzzling beer down onto his sputtering son.

“What!,” was her response. Just, wholly without a clue. And then, so fast whips cracked, she suffered possession by the several, hideous clues that made her stomach curdle.

Her wand was out. She charged forward. Something banged, which she later realized was the mother escaping through the back door. And she could very much see Severus now, soaked head to toe, while with a whoosh the Muggle man exploded into flying papers.

Wood splintered and caved under a thick back. The wall behind cracked under the wallpaper in a way distinctive to elbows and the back of a head.

And then the whirlwind, and the hornets, and the deadening eyes. 

Minerva had to leave to gather her thoughts. She needed enough of them in order to pen a missive. She had no owl, so what she wrote was mostly used as a script, held close to her Patronus-turned-reading-light. 

After she dictated her message and let the small tabby disappear through the walls, the old witch showered, ate, sunk into her bed, and spent hours failing to sleep.

She had dozed off once, and vaguely remembered dreaming. There was screaming, and a desk was burning in Fiendfyre shaped, inexplicably, like ordinary things: window panes and bed curtains, boys’ shoes, wands, pointed hats. 

But when she woke up, she couldn’t say that she had dreamed explicitly of Hogwarts, and the dissonance of those things she knew turning hungry kept her up until dawn.

Albus had replied shortly after sunrise. He had sent his reply, written, via owl.

“ _Dear Minerva,_

_This is quite concerning to hear, as I am sure it is concerning to report. Obviously, it is the case that Severus Snape can no longer be safely housed with his family, if what you witnessed is indeed as you say._

_Unfortunately, the reality of this particular student having a Muggle parent, and living in a Muggle town, is that jurisdiction might be an issue affecting his immediate removal to a preferable housing situation._

_Moreover, since it is the opinion of both myself and Madam Pomfrey that Hogwarts might become a similarly hostile environment for Severus, it is inadvisable that you should return him to the school._

_In addition to this, his returning home becomes another jurisdictional issue, in a way, since Hogwarts must default to the primary guardians until it is proven that they are inadequate._

_I will speak with the Ministry’s Department of Family and Child Services about possible options given the situation. I would like your consent to use a memory of your report as evidence of possible mistreatment._

_(I will personally show that any mentions of performing magic were for self-defense.)_

_Likewise, I ask that, if you are willing, you remain in the area until further notice. I believe it is important to keep a member of Hogwarts faculty nearby, in case of emergency or, in the best case, approval for relocation._

_I, of course, will understand if you chose to return to your classes instead. You have described quite an ordeal, and of course, as Headmaster, I must also consider your well-being._

_Please use this owl at your discretion. It has been instructed to await your reply._

_Best wishes,_

_Albus.”_

Honestly, she didn’t know what to write back. She had a depth of feeling that she could not comprehend completely, when her emotions seemed to have found a far and newer low. Overall, she just kept feeling more and more disappointed and disillusioned with an idea of the world she hadn’t realized she held so religiously: a world moved by the notion of justice.

She now sat and stared at the girl dusting the house plant. And when the girl left, she did so out the nearby window, stepping easily into the garden outside. She passed quickly, bobbing her head, and left revealing brown cobblestones on the main street. 

Curtains fluttered and a phantom of Minerva’s dream last night passed through her, making her shiver. Outside, even if it wasn’t lush with the season, it was sun-washed and warm. Minerva leaned back, letting the chair sway while she took in the day. She watched a mother and her teenage son walk hand-in-hand towards the inn, thinking of...

Wait.

Her head on a swivel, she trailed the pair with her eyes while they grew more familiar. The whole of Eileen Snape’s body, she saw, was still long and thin. Except for a pouch in the front made obvious by the wind pulling her frock against her body. Minerva never noticed the body of the woman before she was wrestled by it. 

That it existed in the same, self-assured space as inanimate objects was fascinating to behold. When her husband shouted, both the woman and her son, having curled up inside and gone dormant, left their bodies to hush like empty lots. 

When Minerva leapt from her chair, strode out to meet them on the street, they were two distinct people again: Severus had a hair stuck in an eyelash when he avoided her gaze; and Eileen, flushed across one cheekbone, panted when she threw her son at his professor.

“Take him,” the woman breathed. Her scowl threatened evil if the teacher didn’t.

Minerva did, reaching out to grab him, stunned, not caring how the teen boy slipped his palm out of hers. She couldn’t hold his hand like his mother did, nor was she sure that she even wanted to, but she was transfixed on other things…

Eileen’s cheek was definitely bruising, but her eyes never cared. What happened after she left, Minerva wanted to know; but then, she left them behind with only a hex for protection, so she hardly had the right to ask. 

But overnight, the yawning dark of her look became focused quite like how obsidian can be cut to resemble defiance of the states of matter, black water and glass: a smothering, liquid depth, like oil; things died in that black; but it opened up to Minerva as cold as space without stars; there was no living place there for MInerva to stand.

Not empty. Eileen Snape couldn’t be empty, if she survived the unstoried night just to bring it out in the daytime. Her bruised face and underfed son weren’t a mote less real sat in the blue morning. Far from empty, they were realer than Minerva, in her fresh wool skirts and smelling like continental brunch. 

The fact of that made her a little stupid.

“Where - you can’t be going back?!,” she blurted. Minerva winced at her own tactlessness when Eileen, who had begun leaving, turned and glared.

“I swear on your life, you better keep him away from here,” the other woman hissed, stabbing a finger behind them both. It was like a wand, almost, ready to cast.

They spent a moment looking at each other. Minerva puzzled at why a witch, who might have been able to shoot lightning from her fingertips if she was mad enough: what made her need help. And then, if something that unfair really existed in everyday lives, something that could bring this - seething power - to asking, then why didn’t Eileen see the mammoth of poor luck at work and accept the help others would give her.

Why leave only the boy with Minerva? Why not stay herself?

Oh, but Minerva thought, ears smoking, as a professor, she was the other meant to be lending help, yeah? Yes. 

She...Eileen was an adult, not like her own child. She sought out the help Minerva could give for the student she was trained to protect. Minerva hadn’t been asked for anything more, for the parent whose protection she couldn’t fathom. 

Still.

“I - think it would be best if you left with us,” she said, “Your son needs you.”

Whatever Eileen heard, Minerva figured it turned her stomach. She didn’t say anything to or at the Hogwarts professor after that. Eileen just wrapped her skinny arms about her and made her way back down the road. 

And she, unlike Severus, was a grown adult.

Minerva had no right to stop her.


	3. The Cat’s Eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theirs was a house of covered mirrors.

After the meddling hag slid off into the street, Eileen sat by her husband’s side in the bedroom, wishing he was dead. The wish came and went, as it usually did, in silence.

Her eyes stung with watching, grew wet, and were then scrubbed clear again because nothing, not even crying, could get in the way of this: his worthlessness.

It was a sloppy masterpiece. The man dragged it over the wood floors between his belly and the mess of papers and book spines. Books she never read, that the boy had brought home as - what? Gifts? And her husband had built a leaning bookshelf for them, to point his chin and grunt approvingly at. Or curse for being crooked.

A piffling favor and he whimpered through the wreck of it.

She had let Tobias crawl through the house, halfway to the yard: for what? She had no idea, what he could have figured the air outside might cure him of. Maybe he thought it the bane of the magic, since he was so sure magic was unnatural that he could have hoped, by some grace of his god, that the skies would crack open and wash away the hex.

But if any deity knew him, the sky would stay bone dry.

She was so used to thinking these thoughts and ignoring them that they rolled around in her head, gathering size. Then they spoke, again, and like a nosy aunt, cut the current moment into its common, shameful horrors - the filthy house, the Muggle she was tied to, the stinking child - and the spectacle: she could see the crack of her husband’s hairy backside.

Babying around on the floor had worked his denim shorts down to his thighs. Swatting wasps pulled up his shirt and undershirt; and there were splinters soaking in the sweat in small of his back. 

His briefs, too, were hanging on for dear life. What last scrap of his decency would be lost if his clothes gave up the view of his full, unwiped ass, and cowering beneath that, his wrinkled sack?

Oop, there they go. Out for the world, like the red, scrunched up faces of two screaming toddlers, dragging on the wood floor. That foul woman, McGonagall, should’ve stayed a moment longer: let her be afflicted with the sight of them. 

Toby yelled something, sobbing a bit from frustration if not pain. Swimming through debris with flailing arms. Her eyes started to tighten from too long without blinking. Her face tightened too, suddenly, from a flush of heat.

On some level, she was mortified. Embarrassed for him, and enraged by the disrespect the wizarding world had visited onto her home, after leaving her alone in it for so long. But on a much more accessible plane, Eileen wished, with real disappointment, that she had at some point learned how to take photographs. She wanted to capture this moment for posterity. To have it just in her memories was useless, as those often left her.

Tobias shouted again, deciding to run for the back door. The drunken, hurting idiot tripped over his own feet and wailed. 

She laughed. Out loud, for a second, in a lightning quick materialization of deep cynicism to mirth. 

She couldn’t stop it; it slipped out. It sounded to her own ears like a cough, but she felt eyes touch her and move away. Subtly, then again: on and away.

She turned to see her child.

He smelled fermented, like the beer, but like sweat and dust and the age in his clothes as well. It made her sick, like one felt when they saw a hairless dog, that should have been a stray, inexplicably collared and tied to a fence. Someone owned him, and yet he was this. And then she saw her husband’s nose on him and somehow, this explained things.

And then again, she looked, and met someone familiar in his face. It was possible, with all the hair covering him, and the dark eyes and the long clothes: Severus was obscured enough that it let her read something close in him. When his arm moved - and she moved away - she saw a wand go into his pocket.

See, her memory: she barely recalled buying it for him. What funds did they have to get his school things, and how had she wiggled them out of Tobias’ allowance?

Eileen could remember, though, feeling how important it was that he had that wand, before anything else, and after anything else as well. It might have been the one thing she cared about that year, that wasn’t quotidian survival, everyday aches and reprieves.

A spike in her cycle of holding and letting go: a white knuckled grip, the fade into nothing, and Severus’ wand. Then hardly anything, again, as he was off to school for months, and even while he was here as of late, she had taken to forgetting about him like she had the chair her husband also sat on.

But the wand in his pocket struck her like a photograph. When she had seen it in his hand, for the first time since he used hers as a small boy, it kicked her memory into alignment with her sleepwalking, and the years that floated around her, untouched, had vanished.

They had happened; they were gone. Eileen winced at the vivid nearness of her son toting a rage like his father’s, which felt like her times of being spat on. He had done rage in a way Tobias had never tried, which she wasn’t sure made it better. 

This flash of something, the wand, made it different: a different kind of disregard for what ragged peace she had being broken. Her sense for other things rolled from her husband, onto the boy.

He pressed flat. And he smelled.

She welled with the want to hit him. It wasn’t blinding and animal, like it had been before, but it fell deep into the imperfections of her sanity and self-control.

“Go upstairs,” she rasped at the boy. He jumped and looked at her, wide eyed, like she’d shaken him awake.

She glared until he heard her without her repeating herself. Merlin help him if she had to do that. He jerked and Eileen saw, confused and then mortified, that she had wrapped her hand around his, and was squeezing it. His comparably thin fingers in hers, all gripping the handle of his wand.

Magic crackled invisibly when she ripped her hand away and swatted at him. He ducked off to his room and she watched him now, over Toby’s cursing and whimpering. The boy slowed, and brushed his hair from his face to peer down the hall at his father. She saw his head tilt and knew, hissing, that he, like her, could watch the man grovel for hours.

“Up!,” she snapped. Severus paused, glanced back her over the shirt he was using to wipe his face; the boy murmured something, an unsolicited apology, and was gone up the stairs to his room.

His leaving punctuated the end of Tobias’ brief torture. Eileen vowed to remember it as best she could while she considered how to end the hex. Now minutes after the caster had left, the paper wasps were flagging, some already falling dead into her husband’s hair and clothes. Some slipped under his collar and, she guessed, pricked him with their sharp corners, because the man yelled again.

“Damn you! Damn you to fucking hell!”

Eileen did her best to end the magic quickly, patting herself for her wand, not remembering if today was a day that Tobias had thought to hide it. Sometimes she went to pull her wand from the inside pocket of her housecoat, only to find it missing. She hadn’t checked since this morning, or yesterday morning but: no, it was there. She drew it and, a little mournful, removed the hex.

Then she bent down and offered Tobias her arms for support. It took a while to get him upright, and while he swore and shoved her away, and drew her close, and sobbed from the pain of the welts, Eileen said nothing.

It was all a chore: getting him to lie on the couch, only for him to demand to be in the bedroom; to heal him with spells, only to be yelled at, then to be begged, and then to be thanked; to see the shift in his face from too many moments spent quiet and suddenly he was pulling at her hair, and her wand was thrown behind the nightstand; and when she cried out, he was furious; and when she was quiet, he was furious; and when he was sorry, she didn’t believe him, but what could she do when sorry was all this man had to give.

She nursed him for a few hours. He needed aid for his stings, which faded quickly anyway, but then something to throw his weight against, to feel more secure. Mostly, he just yelled. When he touched her leg and she froze, but for once he was too tired to make his own permissions. Eventually, she could almost put him to sleep.

He demanded a drink for his nerves, though, and so she walked down to the kitchen after fetching her wand, moving silently over the old steps. 

Eileen didn’t hate doing this, not deeply at least. In a way, she was healing herself. Her house had been seized today, by some busybody from the outside without a lick of sense about the rules.

“Make it how I like it. Don’t fuck it up,” he called down at her, bemoaning his hurts. She resolved to spell a glass of water to taste like cheap whiskey.

And while the water poured from the tap, it turned to the wrong shade of swirling amber in the short jar of ice, but he never noticed, so she didn’t care. She wasn’t good enough at minute transfigurations to try and correct it, anyway.

While his drink poured, she let other thoughts come. Automatically, she pictured Tobias’s wailing, welted, furry bottom, and snorted. 

It was just as ugly in broad daylight as it was at night. High and round, sure, and fine on its own, but she had divorced herself from interest in bodies years ago. They tended to act without her input, and she disliked the wiliness of that - things entering and leaving as they please.

As she felt this, she looked away from her hand, tapping her wand against the glass. She spun the ice lazily, taking her time going back to the bedside. Hopefully, Tobias would be asleep when she returned, and she preferred her thoughts anyway.

She rather desperately needed to think, in fact. Things concerned her.

Severus shouldn’t have been home yet. She suspected so when she saw him on the doorstep and was horribly upset at being right. Even thinking about it earlier while watching her husband doze off into his pillow brought her anger, of a bone rattling sort. This returned now, over the sink, making her mouth wet from nausea.

She hardly cared why they brought him home, because regardless of the reason, he was her responsibility again, as if she didn’t already have herself. If the child had caused trouble - which Hogwarts might not have said, in those words, because straightforward isn’t the educated thing - but if he had gotten himself expelled, then gods preserve them both. Especially after today: Tobias would rip him to shreds.

Or possibly worse, vice versa. Severus would do some demon thing and kill them. That’s how she always saw it, from the day he popped out screaming: this thing would be the end of her. It was horrible to think, from what she understood of motherhood before it found her. 

Some people were glad to die for their children. The idea was that the heir was the self extended. But for years, Severus, to her, was his father. 

Well, before school he might have been a bit of herself, but that felt so long ago. Even though, now that she thought of it, he lived longer as her child than as Tobias’s, but that wasn’t such a good thing. She loathed herself quite a bit back then. Now, she hardly thought of herself, so of course there was nothing in her to live in someone else.

And every year, Severus had more of his father’s face and, in quick flashes, his bitterness and disgust. He had his scowl, she counted, and his teeth and his nose and even a bit of his voice since this past winter. Every time the school let him go, the child was more his father. 

And this year they let him go early, hand-delivered him to her, to here, where he visited more violence onto her already bruised life -

_ No. Not his mother’s life. _

Eileen swore. The jar overflowed with cold water that trickled down her wrist. She switched hands, holding the jar with her wand and drying her hands on her dress. Done with herself, she shut of the tap with a petulant twist and went to give her husband his damn drink.

It irked her immensely to realize that the voice of that intrusive thought spoke with a faint brogue.

Suddenly, she felt chastised. It came unto her like a draft, but from nowhere she could tell. Eileen even glanced around herself at the top of the stairs to see who might be shaking their finger at her, or why. 

All she saw was a shadow move from under her son’s bedroom door. If she listened closely, she could imagine him pacing. He was horribly quiet about it, which made him seem up to something.

In reality, she heard barely anything. Mostly, just Tobias’s whistling snores.

McGonagall, horrible though she was, brought new things into their world. Eileen felt for once that she had shaken off the perpetual exhaustion that boarded the floors her family walked on.

She faced their room, and watched from the doorway, unmoving, while her husband slept lightly. The glass jar sweat, although her cold hands barely warmed the water inside. She felt that even a creaking floorboard could wake the man up. She almost regretted that the drink she prepared wasn’t alcohol, which could rock him into a deeper sleep.

Upset with the fact that it wasn’t just her and him in the house, she stood still. Honestly, it wasn’t long into the evening. There was so much time left in the day for something to start. 

Severus never slept so easily, and now he was finally becoming a category unto himself. Tobias had minutes until he was well and truly unconscious - even with his eyes closed, he could reach out, expecting her. If he woke up and saw her watching him…

She felt with all her new energy that she hated her life, as it was. As it had been for what was possibly the entire length of it. At least it was easier once, if empty, but then someone caring nothing for her took it, her easy sad life, into a fist and crushed it. Into something hard and impossible to pass.

If this person was Tobias - and she felt her hate turn its heavy head towards him, in the bed, weak and evil. But if this person was some past version of herself - 

But her hate didn’t turn inwards. It stayed, pointed one way, with its tail in her stomach and its tongue, flicking, scenting the air. Her skin itched and her heart thudded. 

This awareness of herself took a while to fade, and even then all that lessened was her awareness of the edged, hungry hating. The effects of it on her body, sour stomach and beating heart, remained.

Eileen didn’t move for a good, long while. She stayed by the top of the stairs until the ice in the jar melted into more brown water.

* * *

A door opened.

At some point in however long she stayed, hovering, she heard hinges down the hall squeak and stop. Weight shifted, so tattled the old floors, and she turned to see that Severus had ventured out of his room only a step before he noticed her. 

Looking caught, he started to sink back into his room. She squinted, wondering what he’d been trying, when she realized the time in a general way.

It was late, and her son hadn’t eaten yet.

“Come,” she whispered. 

Severus paused, confused. This annoyed her, because who else would she be talking to? The spiders? The walls? If he wanted to eat, he better damn well eat.

“Go and get food, don’t mind me,” she said.

Unsure of if she wanted to move, or really could, she motioned to downstairs with the thumb of her free hand. The boy, shy for some damn reason, pointed a different way: further down the hall, past her, in the other direction.

Oh, the upstairs bathroom. He might have meant to shower, thinking the rest of them were asleep. Is that all he got up to? Eileen shook her head, knowing the running water would be too loud.

“Wake your father if you want,” she replied.

He leaned back, mostly shadows and the lamp light from his bedroom. She saw his door twitch closed, but never heard it catch. Is that how he spied, with the door ajar, parsing hints of danger from the hallway? When had he become meek?

Really wondering this now, she called him back into the hall as loudly as she could afford. From the dark of her room, her husband rolled over. This reminded her that she still held a jar of warm water in her hand. Severus’ door creaked again and looking to him peering out at her, she made him wait. 

He did, blank faced, but she knew that look - she invented that look. The boy was uneasy and trying not to show it. 

She found his wariness smart, and a little funny. Of all three of them in this house together, he was nervous of her, and she, resentfully, of him. 

And she saw very clearly now, when Tobias settled back into loud slumber, that they each were untrustworthy in association with the same man. A man they had both watched roll around, helpless, hours before because of magicked scraps of paper.

She inhaled that little huff she felt earlier that day. Laughing seemed inappropriate when volume was of dire importance.

But then she caught the light dim in Severus’ room, even though he was at the door facing her, and unless he had snuck that Evans girl in his room to affect the mood, he had spelled it dark. Without a wand, even, which he was wont to do without thinking. Like a child did: projecting his feelings onto the world, forgetting that there was magic in it to receive them.

What a sensitive boy, to take comfort in the dark.

Another new thought: and with it came the realization that he could have taken more after his father. It could be worse. He might have had no magic at all, and then he would have nothing of her. 

But then even that was untrue, she could tell, because when she saw just his silhouette embossed on the shadows in the hallway, she recognized borrowings from herself. Her hair, her height, her frame, alongside her magic.

And his quiet feet were hers - and his long hands, and general silence. Maybe he hated him having his father’s voice as much as she did. Maybe this was why he barely used it in front of her.

She wished, suddenly so full of wishes, that she could go back to the night he was made and have him inherit nothing of Tobias’ and everything of hers. She wished that, if he had to exist, that he existed at least somewhat because of her. 

She felt that, if he was totally hers, then nothing he did could be too terrible; because when he was Tobias’s, she hated to even see him breathe for what it might mean for herself.

Eileen saw in her mind how easily her husband had been cursed. She remembered why she used to teach Severus spells: because he could learn them. So that he could go into the wizarding world like a wizard, as surely as his mother was a witch, if a trapped one. 

She translated every fantasy she ever had against Tobias into lessons and had daydreams about her boy using them. Back years ago, when Severus was a minute extension of herself. When she was more, through him.

And then he had come back from his first year at Hogwarts, older, angry, and that scared her. It scared her because, simply over time, his father’s meanness drowned the parts of her she had sown in him.

Eileen, in the time she now spent looking at her teenage son, wavered between two views of the world. In one, the one where Severus ignored her and turned back into his room, shutting the door: in that one, she withered away. Fell back into her grey fog of sleep and never woke up.

But in the other worldview, the one this moment was suspended in: where some affect of her expression kept her son, her son, standing attentively in his doorway, waiting for her to speak: in that one, she was a vulture. Ready to pick out any rotting thing the Muggle man had left in her child, and if there was anything worthwhile left, like a dark witch, she’d smear it with her blood until it reeked of her.

Settled in something, she waved Severus to the bathroom. He had no business going to bed unwashed, leaving the sheets smelling like beer. 

She waved him once, twice more, throwing a dismissive gesture in her husband’s direction. Her knees popped when she stretched them to meet her boy, handing him the jar of water as he approached. She told him to pour it out.

“I could wait…,” Severus offered. Eileen sighed, disgusted, and pushed him toward the shower.

“You make me repeat myself again, child, and I swear,” she answered.

He hesitated, looking back at her and the bedroom door and then at her again. He was clearly uncomfortable, from the set of his shoulders, and despite that she watched him hawkishly until he was in the bathroom, door clicking shut. 

She heard a ‘snck’ of the lock turning, which struck her as another act of hilarious forethought. Not hilarious because it was unnecessary - she was glad for his preparedness - but because it was something she would’ve done. And these small things, from him, were unintentional and so important.

* * *

Tobias blinked himself awake when he heard the water running. Eileen watched down at him, standing on his side of the bed: the furrowing in his brow and the curling of his lip. She swore she even watched the hairs on his chin grow while he rose out of sleep, fascinated by every loathsome bit of him.

When he opened his bleary eyes and saw her, he startled.

When they first met, he had laughed and called her a ghost. 

“Like the Grey Lady,” she could remember in his deep, gruff chuckle, “only less beautiful.” 

She thought at the time that he was a wizard, even though he didn’t look like one, because the Grey Lady of Hogwarts was so graceful and mysterious, that even if she wasn’t as well-featured, she had taken the comparison as a compliment.

This was how a man should approach her, she had felt then, and then perhaps she would be more interested in men.

She wondered how much of the Grey Lady she favored now. The Muggle one, surreal and mournful, waiting for him with the deep-set black eyes he always called “bloody chilling,” before he groped her. Eileen felt rather ghoulish when the man receded into the thick of the bed dressings, recoiling from her.

Although she knew it was Severus’ shower that woke him, she felt as if only her glaring might have done it. She knew how much her glaring disturbed him, like she could do ill with looks.

Well, it was possible she could. Eileen pondered seriously how much harm she could do him with willpower alone.

Almost as if reading her mind, he shouted and hit her. It was hard, harder than when he was fully awake, as it was uninhibited. Raw, rabbit fear made him slap her open-handed across the face.

“What the hell is up with that! The hell are you doin’, scarin’ me like that! You must’ve lost your heathen mind!”

“I must have,” she replied, speaking lightly.

She stayed looking at the wall, where her head at snapped, feeling her cheek throb. It would hurt much more in an hour, she knew. The glancing blow past her nose made that sore as well. When the water from the shower shut off, she took a deep breath and looked back at her husband.

Toby was half out of the sheets, rubbing his chest like he had pain there. He frowned at the wall past her.

“Who’s doing what in the middle of the pissin’ night,” he grunted.

“Severus is washing.”

“It’s gotta be two in the fuckin’ morning!”

“Well, he didn’t magically become clean at midnight, so,” she retorted.

He looked at her, unhappy with her tone.

“Watch how you talk to me, woman. I’m not in the mood.”

Neither was she. She held his gaze steadily, while she listened to her son leave the bathroom and pad down the hall towards his room. When footsteps stuttered past their door, which she had closed, she held her breath until they continued on their way. 

Except, they didn’t. Eileen knew, then, that the boy was waiting outside their room for a sign of trouble. She had no clue what he planned to do if there was some, but given the handiness he had with his wand.

It still made her scared to think that he was violent. But that was excluding the fact that so was she.

* * *

Outside, from the hallway, she was sure Severus couldn’t hear a thing. She had the luxury of silencing charms, without the need to dance around Muggle constitutions. To the rest of the house, the night was quiet.

In the room, it was only mostly quiet. While Tobias fell back asleep, suddenly unable to stop his eyelids from fluttering closed, Eileen watched.

And she watched, still wordlessly, as he sagged into dreams, and how over ten, twenty minutes, his body became tense. Her eyes drank in her husband, stiff as a board, beaded with sweat along his forehead and on the nape neck. 

And as wetness rolled over the tiny hairs onto his back, she watched his breathing shallow, as if he had started to run. 

Over the next hour, then two, while his breathing quickened into panting, and his fists clenched, and his legs kicked, she sat up and kept him company. She nursed his nightmares now, watching them make havoc. 

She dozed off once, and dreamt that tiny devils that resembled her son were dancing on his temples. It was pleasant, but ended quickly. Dawn came reluctantly, and beyond then, he was still turning. Playing the good wife, the witch patted his brow dry with the sheets, like it was just a fever that needed sweating out.

Then she dressed, checking her face in the wardrobe mirror while her husband groaned pitifully in his sleep. Eileen didn’t look like much, with her sunken face and purpling cheek - the bruise did have fingers, which curled around her eye socket, making her face more skeletal even as it swelled. 

Ghostly she might have been, and after staying up almost the entire night with Tobias, ghostly she surely felt.

She arranged herself as much as she cared to when, really, she didn’t want to be seen. Having only Tobias to come home to challenged the point of leaving at all.

While thinking this, Eileen snapped open the bedroom door and looked down, her foot hitting soft.

For hell’s sake, her son had spent the night in the hallway. His head was slumped over to rest on his forearms, which he propped on his bended knees. He looked folded up for convenience, like a Muggle lawn chair. 

She shook his shoulder and told him to get dressed.

“Mum?,” he asked, awake in seconds.

“Yes, who else,” she tsked, quietly welling with how alert he was. Proud, was the word. “What was the point of showering if you’re going to sleep on the damned floor. Be downstairs dressed in twenty minutes.”

“What happened?”

She looked at him, shocked. Glancing behind her to see that, yes, she had the door cracked behind her, she debated showing the boy what she had done. It was his father, after all. But let him know, too, what there was to her.

She stepped away from the door and gestured in.

Her son didn’t take much to understand, because he was clever. He only needed to see for a second, apparently, for him to know the real. His opinion of it, of course, was carefully neutral. 

Eileen did note, however, that he was fast and unbothered in standing to find his room. Once found, he moved around in it with the door more than ajar, practically open in the spirit of the word. 

Funny, that, too.

Half an hour later, they were downstairs, over breakfast. It was nothing much, toast and milk. The sun creeped gradually more into the kitchen through the low window while they drank and chewed.

“Explain to me,” Eileen started slowly, “why you aren’t in school right now.”

He met her eyes and looked down again. He stopped tearing at his toast and frowned at his hands which, for a tick, she saw were shaking. She felt immediately in danger.

“What,” she demanded.

“…There is a wer…,” but he trailed off. Eileen persisted but he took up lying, like he did, and she could tell in how calm he looked when he did it. Merlin, he learned everything from her, and even when it galled her, she was in awe.

Children: who knew.

“You can’t mean to say that some boys were picking on you and the school sent you home,” she challenged.

He shrugged, and said, “apparently.” 

That didn’t make any sense to either of them. She could tell from how his face spasmed between irritated and unconcerned. Unconcerned, read: lying.

“Boyhood bullying isn’t a reason to send you home early, Severus.”

“Don’t say it like that,” he said, shifting in his seat. She narrowed her eyes at him. “It’s not ‘boyhood bullying’ when we honestly hate each other.”

Was he being proud of his little squabbles? Did teenagers do that? She had no idea.

“Did the other boys get sent home?,” she asked.

“I don’t know. You should have asked McGonagall when she was here,” he complained. Eileen gripped the knife, which she was dipping into the jar of butter.

“Mind that tone, because I’m not -,” but she thought immediately of the man upstairs, and was doubly irritated. That he would talk to her like he was her parent was mildly enraging. She would stoke that rage when she was alone.

“Fine then. Where might she have gone,” Eileen prompted her smart mouth child.

He looked at her warily, seemingly unsure of where her question led. She didn’t know how he could not have guessed her intention, but perhaps because it meant going outside, which wasn’t her fondest activity.

It wasn’t as though she couldn’t leave the house, though, especially when she had dressed for it. She usually lacked any reason to, is all.

Getting Severus to school was, and remained, her only public business.

“I figure she just went back to Hogwarts,” he said. His fingers were back in his food, tearing and eating none of it. At least he drank the milk.

“I didn’t see her or hear her Disapparate. Did she walk to Hogwarts then?”

“I mean, she might have left from the hotel,” he suggested, already looking out the window. He clearly didn’t think he was going anywhere. 

Eileen smacked the table with her wand and pointed it at his shirt. It unwrinkled itself, and might now have been imbued with a cloaking property, as she had no sense for strictly domestic charms.

“What hotel.”

* * *

Professor McGonagall had come outside to meet them. Surely she couldn’t have been expecting them, but Eileen could also admit that the habits of wizards were a little beyond her now. Her world of magic was herself and her son, and they didn’t make a habit of anticipating anybody new. Or at least, she didn’t.

Already, she was speaking for them both.

The inn was, as Severus had described, “ridiculous.” It had the look of a spring cottage in the touristy part of town, farthest from where their street meandered off towards old factories.

It was bright white, with flowering bushes, and a hand painted sign hung above the door welcoming guests. The shutters were unnaturally straight and richly painted, and altogether the building looked brand new in a town of almost historical presence.

It immediately repulsed her, like a demon from a chapel, and she accepted on some level that while she had seen uglier than herself, she was no pretty dame for pretty houses. If she had been back when she was in one, then definitely not anymore.

She felt Severus slow down beside her and snapped at him to keep apace. When he slowed down again, she grabbed his hand and towed him along like when he was an infant. If he wanted to act childish, she would treat him as such. 

He should have been better suited to obnoxiously pretty things anyway, more so than she was. Eileen had, after all, seen the girl he followed so closely, even if she had only glimpsed them through the curtains.

“Hurry up.”

“She isn’t going to take me back,” he protested, but he walked.

Obviously, he wanted to go back. 

He needn’t worry about rejection, then, as it was his mother’s job to make them have him. Eileen practically threw Severus at the old professor and made her intent very clear.

She stared after she did so. She only looked away when her message was received. She hadn’t been given a good enough reason to keep the boy at home, and frankly, she doubted there was one. So she decided she didn’t care. Seeing Severus by the other witch’s side, going away, was fine.

She turned back towards Spinner’s End.

“Where - you can’t be going back?!,” exclaimed the other woman. Eileen looked back, expressing outwardly how little of McGonagall’s business her affairs were.

“I swear on your life, you better keep him away from here,” she said, and oh, how much she meant it.

Thinking on her husband, twisted with fear, Eileen could visit that pain on anyone. It was only her pain shared, of which she had stores and stores. She would be damned if McGonagall, in her pleated skirt and trim glasses and neat looks, had a defense of greater pain to swallow hers.

McGonagall would surely be damned if she didn’t, at least, if just for a night.

“I - think it would be best if you left with us. Your son needs you.”

Eileen was disturbed by how much Severus tried not to agree. She saw him, his face wrestled into blankness but just breaking enough to scowl deeply, angry to be found out but smart enough to hide in what. 

He could have just been upset that he was being used. But he wasn’t, and she felt that. When he saw the bruise on her face that morning, he sobered impossibly fast. He looked, for a second, like he had hit her himself, when all he’d done was give her and his father their privacy.

Perhaps he was distraught at betraying his own instincts, or letting petty things like doors stop him. But she wasn’t a victim. She cut the busybody a frown pinning her lips’ corners to her heels. She would not have the boy make them look feeble. 

Still, he was a loyal son, if anything. That was precious, and just then, less than necessary. She looked to him and told him non-verbally to do his duty. His job was to leave, and come back when he was supposed to. That was the only way she knew how to live around him.

She covered herself, having felt a chill, and turned back towards home. That place, after all, was all they had whenever Hogwarts packed her boy back up for the real world.

_ Your son needs you. _

She scoffed. She made him. What didn’t he have of her that she had left to give?


	4. The What Dragged In

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing so unwanted is also unknown.

The boy folded into the armchair in Minerva’s room, angled and in the corner as scuffed and untelling as his luggage. Something in the time to cart his clattering trunk into lifts and down one measly hall, Severus Snape had disappeared thoroughly into the jerking lanky limbs of some unanswered grotesque made animate.

And Minerva had quickly began to fray.

He hung behind her, vaguely downwards, every so often the hitch in the rickety wheels of the brass luggage cart playing at a shuddering breath. She would glance back every time and find nothing but the black, dead-eyed gaze, a drowned body upright and dry and sixteen and vexing her.

“Have you eaten?,” she snapped once, opening the door to her room, back so pin straight her neck ached.

She didn’t even look back to see his reply, even while knowing she needed to see his face. The boy was impossibly quiet in his haunting, despite the loud, awkward thump of his sneakers on the inn carpet. Half of hearing him was reading his bloody lips.

She realized then that panic crept.

He left the door open when he scuffled in, making her smile tightly when she reached across his back and pushed it shut. And then suddenly, she was alone with him, well outside of what she felt sensible or expected or appropriate. In her personal space, where no student should ever be. She had a cardigan hung on a chair here. She had her purse open on the unused side of the narrow bed.

He need not see that—no stringy, uncooked, withering child need see her personal effects in the open. This wasn’t her office, curated for student eyes to roam in all directions and see the souvenirs of her career, perhaps an attended teacup, her family’s tartan, a few biscuits, unsampled, on a dish. It wasn’t presentable, but she couldn’t very well leave him in the hallway.

Minerva pointed him to the chair, aware that the woman who had insisted on this trip some days ago was no longer herself. She was changed and into quaking. Eileen Snape had surrendered her son and made off back to that hair shirt husband. Maybe each parent was miserable as the other, but even then only by so much, and here Minerva found herself their porter.

Not a professional, not a portent of reason and sense and mature conversation, but a babbler, a babysitter.

The wraithlike witch had at least given the boy a chance, or just away, in either case maybe for the best. But so suddenly? Without warning or instruction besides, “Don’t bring him back.”

And within Minerva, as she hovered by the desk, guilt warred with self-defense in the knowledge that she should’ve left with the boy the day before. Shame made itself known, kindness-starved and ravenous, eating every generous thought she could have for her frazzled self and leaving: “Well, you’re his professor. You should’ve known to take custody.”

“I will update the Headmaster, and he…,” she started, out loud, to the teen, except she had already written to him. She realized this, petering off.

What more could she say? The home was just as unsuitable except the boy was no longer in it?

Severus looked up at her, fingers steepled and pointing to a spot on the floor crisscrossed by his broken laces. Merlin, but when he moved his toes, his shoes yawned. And they couldn’t be the right size for his feet. The boy was thin, but not tiny, not when comparable to herself at her full height and her feet in her own shoes were pinching.

It wasn’t right.

She saw dozens of her bustling doppelgängers over six recounted years, hurrying past the child and who knew how many others at a waymaker’s pace. She imagined all the times she excused herself skirting around the stooped Slytherin, frowning at his head bowed to listen to Lily Evans’s chatter, or to weather anyone else’s. Lecturing him only so much before sending him to Poppy and Horace, the boy skulking off, and as soon as her back turned, fading out of her jurisdiction,

How many times had she navigated Severus Snape while the boy scowled in ill-fitting shoes? What other days spent bullied by his father were now obvious in those shoes and wrinkled t-shirts? And worn and too-short robes?

Minerva couldn’t know without a clear head. Her thoughts, like her effects, were scattered about the room, free and flapping as birds.  

Asking the boy what happened did nothing; mum was the word. He only glared—at his feet, at her, at his reflection in the shiny lift doors, now at the sunny curtains. She said again: “You said you hadn’t eaten?”

“I have,” he muttered, head ducked, looking up at her through that grubby curtain of hair. He needed a haircut, tending to. He grew into the armchair like a weed.

“So have I,” she clipped, although had she?

A bite of scone didn’t count, nor did the minutes watching the steam dissipate over her cooling coffee. She had eggs, and toast with butter, yes. None of it mixed well in her stomach, roiling, flipping, pressing up against her throat instead of down. But she ate,

When was the last time she’d been put off food, she wondered. For some reason, her true north hinged on whether she’d managed to feed herself the same as on any other morning. She had. And what was an endearing, home-style inn—with one teenager—compared to overlooking a castle hall of a thousand students, putting away a full English before the first class of the year.

Minerva turned her thoughts elsewhere when she spoke, something, in Severus’s direction, only for the chair to frown and shake his head, baffled. She cast about the room again. Her purse perched on the quilted bedspread, clasped shut. She ran through its contents, sprinting through a mental inventory. An envelope stuffed with Muggle money lie in there, a crushed tea sachet from some shop sample, perhaps a forgotten snack buried—no, they needn’t forage, goodness.

She could fetch food.

“What did you say you wanted.” She summoned the leather pouch and rummaged, glad for something to do with her hands.

“I...didn’t?”

She frowned at him, only for the teenager to give her his side, his face completely obscured by that ridiculous hair. He picked piling from the upholstery with stained, unclipped fingernails and Minerva was so immediately mired in agitation, it swanned far above her head and fell on her, hot and sharp as any flaming arrow asail to set siege.

She was furious, but at what, truly? They were insulated in unsaid, dark and shapeless musings, not verbal savagery like to her rage. Nobody had said anything of note. There was hardly even street noise in the room, which had a draft despite the day outside shining favorably. The witch was simply incensed.

“Alright then,” she said, low and stony and cold in response. She tamped down on her urge to pull at her hair, or his, and nearly fanned herself, she was so out-of-sorts.

Minerva looked aside at the room’s small, well-polished desk where a quill and stationary rested askew. She projected her thoughts of a next missive onto it. Her envisioned letter to Albus surged from effusive to impertinently brief— _Dear Albus, the events of the day have—Albus, we will return posthaste—Old man, I couldn’t._

“You should rest. Feel free to take the bed, and I will return shortly.”

She harnessed herself in her bag strap and fled.

* * *

Eileen sunk her rigid fingers deep into the dry topsoil. Dry and crumbling, the push against her quick of her fingernails, she scratched at the earth, distracted for her search for something else. Herbs, she meant to harvest herbs—the few, wilting sprigs she kept by the back steps that refused to succumb to the seasonal moldering damp.

For some reason, where the house encroached on the ground in damned defiance, moisture leached from the ground into its walls. Unintentionally, it combatted root rot—exploded their basement in mold, to where it was painted shut—and left Eileen with herbs.

She never used them, hardly acknowledged them before. She was sure they were lures veined with lead, their brown-spotted leaves not even pretty enough to beg to be picked. They were just the forlorn attempt from the polluted, persistent dirt to have her join it.

It was her unspoken triumph to ignore them. So much larger was Eileen Snape than the scraggly green in her yard. But today she had walked farther than she had in some weeks, months even.

When had she last gone that far from the house? To Diagon Alley for the boy’s things? No, he was older now, nearly grown if she squinted. She sent him to shop for himself this year, knowing it would be a short trip with the funds she could give him. She barely blinked when he had come home from it this past August, like the child had been a passing stink in the breeze. And he stood a little taller, frowning at her.

Yes, she remembered.

Today, he’d come home out of season, like the dry spell in the soil. Made sodden and wicked away. She’d done that. Like the walls, she had warned the rot from her boy and took it all inside, veins aching and greying with it, exploding in mold.

She wanted the herbs. Unfeelingly, entering her home with the sun slamming shut away behind her, in the wrecked downstairs dim, hearing her husband’s faint whimpers, she unmoored. And like a dinghy long forgotten whose rope had finally frayed through and set it off to sea, she floated, legs shaking, into her yard to find the herbs.

She wanted them. She would claw them up and shove them into her mouth, and chew and swallow and feel them burn into her belly to taste with the rotting, and be done, well and painted shut.

And yet, she knelt by the concrete steps, edges chipped like her nails, Toby’s pathetic, sniffling cries dripping down from their open bedroom window. She ripped the first herb up by the stem, crushing the bitter leaves in her fist. She flattened her palm, brought it close to eat the alkaline pulp from her own hand like a dog and its master, sick, in need of healing.

And her two fingers still buried in the earth dug up the smell of soil. She turned from her stained hand like an addict, nostrils flaring, eyes so wide she felt them fold the edges of her face, ravenous.

She had meant to swallow the poison weeds from her garden. Instead, she unearthed, panting, sweating, beaten back and shoulders straining with the dig. Eileen gouged out handfuls of dirt, spraying grass and gravel and hairy roots in every direction.

And soon, instead of digging, she found herself in a full gallop downward, and the last rational thought hounded to the edges of her mind asked what she was looking for.

Her fingers sought until they found a fragile, porous stone that she yanked from the clay with a vindictive, “Ha!”

Then blindly, like an animal, or a madwoman, she set upon it. She bit down till it shattered, laying the fragments on her arid tongue. The rasp of her spit-free mouth on the stone made her salivate, so gone was she from her own human mind. And then swiftly she returned, hacking, the pieces of stone sticking to her tongue, making her gag.

Eileen ran her soil-caked nails over her mouth, palate, insides of her cheeks, picking and spitting out rock. She was mid-relinquishing a hollow contour, sobbing at her own brief insanity, when she felt the prickle. Someone was watching her.

Slowly, shuddering, fighting for her breath, she looked to her garden wall with a teary glower. Who? What?

A stray cat bolted from the yard, ringed tail between its legs. She hissed at it even as it ran, disgusted. It had come so close that she could her reflection in the expansive dark of its terrified little eyes. Filthy creature.

Eileen looked down at the mess in lap, just then. She realized she had pinched in her wet, streaky fingers the pitted arch of an eye socket. Puzzling the pieces, her fragile stone had, in fact, been the skull of a baby bird, long fallen from the nest. It’d been eaten, first by the earth, then by her.

She saw it and screamed.

* * *

Minerva shifted in an alley, stumbling into a wall, palms scraping onto the cool brick dusted in pollen. She stared through the inn sign across the street, hands moving over her mouth, fingers shaking on her thinly pressed lips.

She didn’t know what she expected, but the facts remained. Severus couldn’t return home. That was...that woman was...And Minerva suffered her sour stomach, any fantasy of resuming her classes consumed by the fear of wandering—eyes, thoughts. Her teaching self was knots, upset by an empty seat on the Slytherin side of every room.

Her next moves could only involve the boy. Thank Merlin that woman brought Severus to her. The horror the professor felt bred with profound relief at his mother’s foresight, and made more potent her sense of helplessness. The anxiety of caring for him sunk below the terror of leaving him behind.

The boy’s parents were unconscionable. The Muggle father alone was a menace, a terrible bully who left no question in her mind about the depth of the disdain the Slytherin harbored for her Gryffindors. If they were even a quarter so vicious—and with the tricks they invented purely for mischief and torment, they were at least that much—she worried.

The magic Severus had was powerful. Like his mother’s, she suspected. He was already clever in his schoolwork and petty vengeance, and courted by dangerous men.

And his mother? Minerva shivered. When that echoing gaze fixed onto her, it shrunk the tabby cat to a speck in a vast nothing, pulling her in and sending her tumbling, lost and dizzy and optioned with either surrender or an eternity of suffering. That wasn’t a woman channeling human emotion. That was a witch calling desperately to the dark.

The Animagus fled before she witnessed any answer. She straightened now, spelling wrinkles from her clothes and grime from her hands. Surely the situation had changed enough to allow a few executive decisions.

If Severus returned to the castle, he may be set upon by many dangers, and him in such a vulnerable way. The same could be said for his own home. So she would need to know if there were any other options. Neither surrender, nor undue suffering, only safety.

Minerva steadied herself. She came together enough to cross the street.

The professor had already returned a greeting in the lobby when she swore, remembering she had promised them both food. She hadn’t even an idea of what the boy might like. From his size and manner, she doubted he’d had very many options when at home. She had plenty of funding for her stay and the essentials. She could give him a hardy early lunch, perhaps splurge on a favorite dish.

Minerva rolled her eyes at herself, and stayed eyes downcast to the carpet. She wouldn’t know the lad’s favorite anything— his favorite hex, maybe, and not even half as well as her lions. She was barely confident that the Slytherin could say enough to _be_ spoiled.

“Whatever will tide him over,” she decided, striding into the room.

She looked to the chair, inhaling to speak, and noticed it empty. Glancing around, panicked, she found Severus lying supine on the bed. His head made a dead weight on the makeshift pillow from his own jacket.

The teen seemed to have started by sitting, as his bony legs still hung off the side, feet on the ground. However, the rest of him had tilted backwards as sleep carried him off, leaving behind a body of bruised elbows and snuffling snores.

Minerva huffed, annoyed to feel the sting of welling tears. Smudges purpled along his exposed arms and wrist. His scratched face looked red-lashed and irritated, brow wrinkled even in sleep.

And yet he still had the childishness to him. His mouth fell open as he snored. He still had roundness to his arms and cheeks surrounding the pointed, knobby joints.

Only ever a child.

She looked around and found a few things touched, mostly quill and parchment. The desk drawers, still ajar. The curtains, parted. He must’ve had a snoop about, sat down, and keeled over.

Minerva sat and began to draft another letter to Albus. She paused and rolled open a drawer, seeing the headmaster’s previous replies open inside and thumbed through. She glared back over her shoulder, just to be sure the boy hadn’t feigned sleep, realizing he was caught.

If he was acting, she figured he’d do better in theater than in trouble, as he wheezed on, insensate. Nosy brat.

“You, child, would make a terrible spy,” she mumbled, snapping the drawer shut. Then she bent to her task.

_“Dear Headmaster,_

_“Circumstances have changed since our last exchange. The boy’s mother has relinquished custody of him to myself and the school. Similarly, I believe her not in a fit state to care for him herself. I believe it best that he stay under my supervision until we’ve settled on a more permanent solution._

_“For the time being, I will reserve a room for him in the same inn in which I am currently residing. In case of emergency, the address is 45-78 Calleberry Way, Cokeworth. The inn is called the Tabby’s Tail (no relation), on the southwest corner of town…”_

Minerva tapped her quill on the parchment then, debating her next words. She couldn’t be sure of her fears, as they were only suspicions.

When the cat had come across Eileen Snape in the garden, the witch had been hunched over, grunting and burrowing under an open window. Tobacco-browned curtains fluttered out of said window with the stink of diseased sweat and cigarettes. Alongside that, and over the witch’s keening pant, the cat heard the most pitiful moaning. Gruff and agonized, amidst whimpers and tiny cries for help—Minerva had recognized the Muggle’s voice.

Whatever had freed the woman to hunt Minerva down, it had been paid for in her husband’s misery.

If Eileen had cursed the man—or even worked about killing him—Minerva must have some obligation to report it? She came as an agent of the school, in cooperation with the Ministry. Magic against a Muggle, when she had the opportunity to escape, it was simply hostile. Certainly Minerva couldn’t ignore it?

“Ridiculous.” With a scoff, she finished her letter with a tidy signature and waited for an owl to deliver it.

Of course she knew magic upended any conflict with a Muggle, however detestable. She knew that in theory. However in practice, seeing the horror visited on one woman and her child, she disparaged the very notion.

 _He_ had used whatever powers at his disposal against his family. Far be it from Minerva to quail at a greater power, summoned and wielding right punishment.

Except, as she sent the letter, the witch looked at her own wand, wrapped in an aging hand. She felt so terribly average next to the deep, starving terror she’d seen. When Severus’s mother plucked the skull from the earth and _ate_ it, it was a wash of raised hairs down Minerva’s haunches. Even Eileen Snape had been overwrought. That wasn’t sense.

Was anything that driving ever right? Did rightness exist outside of rationality? Minerva thought she knew rage and wrath and heartbreak, but had she, ever, if it drove people to _that_?

She found her cardigan and wrapped it around her despite the room being stuffy. She could admit within herself to being afraid. Obviously, that woman disturbed her. Attacked her once! Needed help.

Less obviously, however, she had sown a morbid curiosity in Minerva’s spirit. The usually self-assured professor asked things of herself she never had before. She was grown, and assumed herself fully formed, and yet she was so quickly found lacking. Broken from routine, smashed on the craggy rocks of a hideous pain not her own.

She felt a voyeur and a witness. And she knew she’d earned Eileen Snape’s scorn for it. And she couldn’t fathom what that might mean. Once she outlived her usefulness, or stepped out of her role as professor, what was she to Eileen Snape. An outsider, likely an ignorant, a busybody, irritant, and fool.

All things the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts didn’t usually know. Persistent? Stern? Yes, as well as educated and an expert in her field. But scared? Immature? Stupid?

Severus stirred to roll onto his stomach, and likely sensing her watching him, flinched and jerked awake with a shout. He spun to face her, jaw tight. It was a foolishly sad look on a teenager. His chin wasn’t cut for such a fierce expression.

“I realize I’d left to feed us both and have no idea of the local fair,” she spun together. He only balled his fists on his lap and scowled at her.

“Mister Snape, do pay attention. I’m saying I would like to _eat_. What would you recommend? Stew? I’ve heard tell of curries. They sound—oh, do relax. The school will fund everything.”

“My family doesn’t eat out. I wouldn’t know,” he said, raising a brow like that should’ve been obvious.

She bristled. Again, Minerva was made to feel stupid. She had even approached the same thought earlier, and yet, here she was: the fool.

She rallied, throwing back her shoulders and folding her hands on the desk. She sat crooked in her chair and bade her student to his feet.

“Well, surely you must at least know the area. You will accompany me if you are able. First, we must set you up in a new room, aft—.”

“We aren’t going back to school?,” he interrupted. He hadn’t moved from the bed besides sitting fully upright and planting his feet. Doing so revealed how high above his sneakers his trouser cuffs rose. He’d clearly outgrown them some years ago.

She harrumphed. “Would you prefer to return? The Headmaster is of the opinion that it’ll be a hostile environment for you, so soon after—the incident. You’re aware that Misters Lupin, Potter, and Black are still in attendance—.”

“Th—so what if they are! I’m not _afraid_ of them,” and he said it glowering, his face molding into his damnable mother’s. Teeth bared, unkindly, eyes narrowed to black slits, lined like with age but instead with promised violence.

Minerva, alarmed, actually lifted her hand to clutch at pearls before forcing herself resolute. Please. He was just a boy.

“You will not interrupt me again! We were having a perfectly civil conversation, and I’d say twice is quite enough!”

He stopped talking, looking away and picking at his fingernails. She hissed as he peeled at a painful looking hangnail, and hurriedly went on:

“Nobody is accusing you of fear. At the very least, I’m not, and I am the only other person in the room.” She eyed him heavily. He rolled up his skinny shoulders and glared at his knees.

“Right then. We might still wait out the rest of your classes until the weekend, to allow you some time to adjust. You are already excused from this week’s homework by your professors. One might as well take advantage before it’s back into the fray.”

She fixed the lay of her cardigan while the teen mulled in sullen silence. When it went on a minute too long, she prompted sharply, “Is that amenable to you, Mister Snape?”

“ _Yes,”_ he hissed in irritation. Minerva cleared her throat pointedly. “Wha—yes, _professor._ ”

“Very well. Now up and out the door. We will rent your room, and then hunt down lunch. And you’ll show excellent manners and help as best you can, correct?”

He paused, sighing slouched in the doorway. “Yes, professor. Of course, professor. Anything you say, professor.”

“Mind your cheek.”

She waved a wand at his luggage and had it follow them. They were nearly in the elevator when he noticed the bags, spat something, and wrangled them all onto a cart. He wheeled the squeaky thing after her as she had not noticed the commotion.

“Muggles!,” Severus whispered, incredulous.

Minerva looked up from her purse, having stopped to check for the room key. The witch hummed at the empty hallway and resumed walking.

“Oh, yes, them. Good lad.”

* * *

Eileen eased the bedroom door open with the steaming bowl balanced in her hands. She shuffled heel-to-toe past the bed, setting it down gently on the nightstand. She blew to cool her burning hands, sensitive and rubbed raw from a vigorous washing. Carefully, she closed the window on the curtains, cutting off the meager breeze clearing the room.

“Toby. Lunch,” she announced, letting her gaze slick over the bowl and onto her husband’s dewy visage.

Tobias had sweat through the bedsheets, and lie in a huge, clinging spot of wet that reeked of body. He needed a bath, but she doubted he could hold himself up to walk.

“C’mon,” Eileen rasped, smacking his cheeks. “Up, get up. Are you hungry or not?”

“Damn bitch,” the man grumbled, before groaning like he had just passed a stone. Her lips twitched, still tingling from the dirt. “Stinking demon slag! Leave! Go to hell!”

She bothered her smock for a damp cloth and dabbed at his furrowed brow. Then she turned, dropping the rag on the floor, and took up the soup. One could smell hot bone broth, salt, pepper, and herbs. She had chopped onions and some carrots for good measure, and they floated, mostly raw, in the liquid. She had only cooked it for so long before losing patience.

She practically vibrated as she scooped a spoonful and hovered it over her husband’s lips.

“Eat, damn you,” she breathed, pouring it down his front. The barely conscious man only sputtered and curled onto his side like a wounded child.

“No more, fuck, fuck, please. You’re gonna kill me, you’re gonna…heathen, ugly, pissing...please.”

She lowered the bowl onto the bedspread, staring into it, seeing her reflection contort on its surface, losing her eyes in the boiled leaves and mangled chunks of vegetables. Disappointment came, and went. So did frustration, and loneliness, and despair, until all she had were the fossil things, not the water but the warped bones of her.

“I hate you,” shared Eileen with no one. It wasn’t for herself to hear—she already knew. And Tobias heard nothing but his own whimpering and the nasty, lingering dreams. “I hate you so much, I can’t breath.”

She looked at her husband’s trembling back and, reaching with timid fingers, stroked it, dragging her fingers through the sweat. She splayed her hand out and pushed it under his shirt, feeling the water, smelling unwashed skin, vision cloudy from thoughts played without blinking.

It was strange, consoling him this way. Feeling his skin and knowing he was afraid, and holding in her mind her wobbling reflection with carrots for eyes—it was all so unreal.

She talked, only a little, with no one to listen. She found a part of her still recording how she felt. Then she opened her mouth and played those private feelings, tendons straining in her neck like the boning on the curves of a gramophone.

Eileen tilted forward with the music running quietly in her chest, suddenly so loud it engulfed her habitual nothingness and made her sway. She crooned:

“I wish, most days, that you would get drunk enough to kill me. But you’re a coward and never do. And now I’m the coward, and want to so badly—end you, end me, and leave the rest of us with the boy—but I can’t. And that’s your fault, somehow. You wouldn’t let us go and now I can’t either.

“And I hate you for that.”

And when the record stopped playing, quiet settled on Eileen and her husband like dust. She rubbed his back like he did during her first time, when he still pretended softness. And she laid her head on his ribs, hearing his heart thud, and promising him a long, torturous life like what he’d given her.

Except another record played on, a song she didn’t want but what looped for her while she soothed him.

_“I—think it would be best if you left with us.”_

“Interfering cow,” she groused without any heat.

_“Your son needs you._

_“Your son needs you.”_

_“Your…”_

_“Your…”_

_“Your…”_

_”Your...”_

Eileen fell asleep to the worried brogue _._


	5. The Chance In Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trying for a short while from deep in the night till dawn.

The lad chose curry. Minerva thanked Merlin for the strangled suggestion, accepting his reluctance to name anything like she had the flinching, his rude manner, his finger-shaped bruises. He mumbled, “I think I’ve seen a place once,” grimacing as if instead of wanting it, the thought of knowing a decent meal disgusted him. 

The eating wasn’t an issue, though, she mused as she cut her turmeric-stained potatoes on her fork edge, swirling them in sauce. He powered dutifully through three platters if she busied herself with the decor. Relief awash the scrubbed restaurant table. She enjoyed the rhythmic in and out of food, chewed and swallowed, utensils tinkling under the rattle of a box fan pushing humid air around the room. 

Few other diners bothered the place, although handfuls of unsure faces glanced through the large front window, and a few of the desperately hungry lingered, noses flat against the glass. She took in the pattern of fogging breaths leaving dew drops smudged through by small fingers. 

Children—Cokeworth ran rampant with them, she saw. On bikes, kicking cans, unattended in the streets: scabby-kneed and hungry children in loose clothes, letting them pass. Some ran up to her tugging at her skirts, smiling cheekily while their tiny siblings stood by, sucking their sticky thumbs. Cherry red cheeks and lolly-blue mouths bounced around askings for candies or pennies or time or a kind smile and she gave what she had—a pound and a softening of eyes, that was all.

Then her stern upper lip and Severus’s shape behind her sent them squealing off paths, into grass, into yards, except the starving who followed at a distance and peered through the glass.

She watched Severus’s hard eyes flit from them to her to his fingers piling flatbreads with meat. The food flow stopped. She put down her milky spiced tea, furrowing her brow, missing the sound of satiation, terse as it was. 

“What’s wrong?,” she prompted. “You can eat. As I’ve said, the school will pay.”

“I know,” he grunted, looking askance out the front window, pulling his collar off of his neck. Untrimmed hair plastered there. She sighed, waving his eyes back to hers.

He resumed eating at her staunch nod, hiccuping once from setting back in too quickly, clearing his throat of phlegm. Minerva pointed to his untouched glass of ice and tap water, sweating in the heat. The restaurant could only keep a few yards of linoleum and vinyl wall-dressing between its blazing kitchens and the seats. She gave in, sucking her teeth, and resorted to fanning herself with a laminated menu, shawl unwound in her lap.

She spat out tendrils of her own dark hair, folded free of its clip since the chaos of yesterday. The boy stared at her, wide-eyed. 

“What?” He returned to his meal, and they finished the hour in silence. 

They stood to leave, each stained according to their own fashion with red stew and garlic oil. She went to pay, wrangling a surly teen with a look and a snap of fingers. He fidgeted, scowling, biting his thumb with medieval bile, although actually she saw him gnaw anxiously down to the cuticle.

“Stop that,” she tutted. “That’s a dreadful habit, biting your nails. Impossible to break.”

“I want to go.”

“We _will_ if you would just be patient. _”_ She rolled her eyes at his drawn out sigh, dropping flake after feeble flake of propriety with every new second in the boiling heat. The register was practically in the fryer with how they suffered. 

The teller counted out Muggle change she barely grasped herself if left to it. Severus sighed again, this time with gusto, and she snapped, “Oh, for goodness’ sake! _Shush.”_

“I want to _leave!_ ” Now, he slid into a whine that raised her hackles. She turned to dress him down about how one acted in public when she heard the bell over the eatery door jingle, and the cashier spat, “What do you want? Out!”

Minerva and her student turned as one to the front, where a girl no older than twelve stood frozen, a crumpled bill poking out of her fist. Her hair, while ironed flat, puffed in the humidity, giving her a fuzzy mane down to her skinny shoulders. She hunched, shocked by the sudden vitriol. 

Minerva immediately had the sense that the cashier, who until then had been focused on parsing quids from quarters, made a show of the girl in front of paying customers. His mustached lip curled, showing tobacco-brown teeth. She didn’t miss the glower he threw Severus’s way either, as though he and the girl were in cahoots. 

“I only came to buy a naan, sir,” the child muttered, looking down at her trainers. “I’ve got money.”

“It’s no good here. Give it to your mam to drink with, like it was meant ‘fore you nicked it from her purse. I said get out!”

Peering out the window at the sidewalk of three, four younger children looking on with held breaths, Minerva understood. Looking to Severus, who glared at the cashier through his curtain of hair, she understood more. 

 _Cokeworth is full of hungry children,_ she thought, dipping into her bag for another few bills. She slammed them on the counter, gesturing the young girl forward. 

“Chin up, child. Don’t let him cow you,” she snipped. “You’re a customer, same as us.”

“Not here she ain’t!” She spun toward the man, who she began to realize was the owner from how he puffed out his chest and gripped both ends of his narrow counter. 

“She is, or neither are we! I can promise you that!”

“Ma’am, these here,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the faces outside, “they’re like strays. You feed ‘em, and they’ll never let you be. It’s best you turn ‘em away at the door.”

Minerva shivered with outrage at the murmuring from the handful of other tables. Patrons twisted around, arms slung over their chairs to watch the spectacle. Some shook their heads at their trays and that was it. A couple with a ribbon-wrapped infant in a high chair just carried on feeding their baby, ignoring the commotion with thinned lips. 

She began to open her mouth when a lock of her hair fluttered from the fan’s blow, tickling her neck, reminding her of its being yanked from its tuck. Without meaning to, she looked to Severus for a cue, mind blacked by the memory of being set upon. She didn’t know everywhere, not in these times. 

He only frowned at his hands, picking at the dead skin there, too pressed to trim it with his teeth. His lips sat busy sealing shut, folding in to go unnoticed. He only spared her a frustrated black flash under straight lashes. 

 _Don’t ask me. I wanted out,_ it said. 

She took a deep breath, and waved the girl even farther forward, although with a gentle wilt off her wrist. A quiet, “ _Come, come,_ ” to her side. The girl was tall for her age, head and shoulders above the metal-braced counter edge. 

“Loathe as I am to pay you another cent for your appalling behaviour,” Minerva said in an undertone, giving the rest of the restaurant her back, touching the girl’s sleeve, “I’ll pay for our meals and five more for the children. Stew, rice, bread, and drinks—.”

“Listen now—!”

“Believe me when I say that I am _losing my patience,”_ she hissed, leaning in close to level her eye with his. Like the girl, she was tall for her age. Like Severus, she was incensed. 

A long mirror made up the back wall to create an illusion of a bigger building. In it, she witnessed herself looming over and the man shrinking. Her flanked by children, and him by the curious chef, an old woman in a headscarf wielding a slotted metal spoon. 

She suspected the old woman was the man’s mother. Possibly even his grandmother, as the longer she beared down on him, the younger he looked. 

“I’m not above calling my husband down here to show you some _manners_.” Severus gasped, something close-lipped, quick and shrill. It did a treat at making Minerva’s threat land square on the owner’s head.

“Now, do you want my coin, or would you rather be embarrassed in your own store in broad daylight? Trust that these children will eat either way, except one way I would prefer immensely to the other. I’ll let you decide exactly _which_.”

The man showed his palms, eyes darting from her and her hands planted alongside his straddling the register, to Severus. Bless the boy, as once he had that panicked attention, he used it: one pitying shrug rolled up around a slow, woeful shake of his shaggy head. Mourning, “Poor idiot,” in a way he’d never done with her, although sometimes she felt he must have. 

“Alright, look! There’s no need to call any husbands, okay? I don’t want any trouble.” The owner barked an order at his mother. The old woman jumped and hustled into the kitchen, clutching her spoon in both hands.

“Christ, I was only doing you a favor.”

“The meals and the bill, please.” She paid, signed off on her order, and nodded her thanks at Severus for his help. Then she asked the girl still standing with arms crossed at her other side, “And what’s your name, miss?”

“Anaïs,” she chirped in quick reply, mouth scrunched. Anaïs returned to staring doggedly into the open kitchen, following the chef with her nervous, brown eyes. Minerva huffed, amused to be so swiftly forgotten. 

It brought her no less satisfaction to pass a stack of weighty styrofoam and waxed paper into her arms. Nimble and deceptively strong, the girl was out of the restaurant in a wink, hefting pounds of food past nosey diners. The door jingled her departure, and the smudged window framed Anaïs leading her excited friends down the street. Minerva enjoyed their muffled shouts carrying on over the eating sounds, shoe soles peeling off the lino, the rickety fan. 

And once their jubilant hoots faded to just the restaurant, similarly did her her smile slip to nothing, a vague slant, tasting her disappointment. Two more children flattened themselves to the glass after the last five left, even younger, with more scuffs on their elbows and a tatter in their clothes. T-shirts worn so long that they gasped at the seams.

She had to look down at her own hands now, sure she could be at this all day and still not beat this town at its long, slow wasting. 

“You’re married?,” Severus murmured once they followed the children outside. The trickle of foot traffic nearly swallowed his words, but she pinched them free of the ambient street talk and cheerful greetings. 

He stood nearby enough to see the tiny pair pick their way across the street, holding their small portions of bread and vegetables for shrunken stomachs. 

“Ha! No. Proposed to many times, but gods no.” She retired her fistful of shawl to her handbag, glad for the extending charm and the inattention of strangers as the bag gulped it down. “Tuh, ‘married.’ With what time?”

She had a fulfilling career before and ahead of her, one that included enough little headaches to put off any personal affair indefinitely. Romance? What man alive could manage it? She had her days in her youth when a smile might hit her face like the gold in sunshine and have her bloom, or a kiss touch the back of her hand and leave her pressing her glove to her cheek, reliving the tingle, thinking wistfully.

Good days, bygone. She rarely ached for them. She never wove memories knot-tight to net new love affairs, wishing to recapture those old, vignette dreams. Minerva liked how time passed for her—gracefully, until this place. 

“Well,” she coughed, “We’ve the rest of the afternoon till sundown. What do you suggest we do?”

Severus looked at her like she could explode into doves like a magician's trick. He perched on his back foot as if ready to bolt but stayed, blinking.

 _Am I that unpredictable?_ She sniffed, looking stern, wrestling the tilt of a grin.

The boy looked silly, and it felt like poking through some cloudy film to see him again. All things considered, he looked better after a meal. He favored an alley cat, rangy and wary and terribly curious, poised over an empty food tin to dare closer to the hand giving it.

“Perhaps a book you can read in your spare time,” she said, smothering a puff when he jumped, startled. “Steady on, child. Lead the way to any bookstore. Mind that it’s _appropriate,_ or you’ll find yourself spending an evening with your nose to the wall.”

His hand twitched as if the touch the tip of his nose, before he tucked in with a red-eared scowl, elbows snug to his sides, embarrassed.

Soon, they blended in with the other pedestrians, bent heads of severe black hair forcing a resemblance where there hadn’t been before. That and perhaps how they fell in step down the sidewalk—Minerva had to assume they looked alike. The handfuls of pedestrians enjoying a post-lunch stroll and light shopping picked up as they rounded closer to the inn.

She found herself snipping at him to straighten up, fix his posture; even fix the part in his hair which sprouted cowlicks once the tamping sweat dried. 

They found a bookstore, and wandered just inside to enjoy the shade and cool, fragrant air. She liked the paper smell. Looking askance, she saw her charge drift from her side, stooped again, squinting at the tiny placards presenting towers of hardcover books.

She wondered idly if he needed glasses. He often frowned and glowered hideously in her classes, at meals, in the hallways with his housemates. If he didn’t look bored or slyly engaged. Minerva loitered by a magazine stand realizing she had no one with whom to lend that thought. 

The boy’s father was unfit and possibly...unwell. His mother _might_ care. She cared something about his well-being, although she proved driven certifiably mad by her circumstance. 

That or driven to murder. Next to that, a child’s need for glasses seemed so tiny, it vanished. She tried to imagine the place miring Eileen Snape as they whiled the day away. She remembered the suck and crack of bone, and wondered how a woman might wash away the taste of bird skull on an average afternoon.

 _Gruesome,_ she shuddered, but then remembered how she liked to watch birds from the castle battlements. Not always as a tabby—sometimes, as a girl, and even once grown. She often paused to watch the Quidditch practice and, looking for the Snitch, stopped to stare and make the sparrows nervous.

She always forgot she liked that between doing it and patting down flyaways caught by the wind, brushing the outside off her robes, and returning to her office. Her nan used to call it “the witch in her,” like it was a wild thing she kept in her blouse. Her nan—a knowing grin pleated with wrinkles, always hinting at why a girl could like the broom so much: to leap and snatch the birds.

When Severus slowed to see a novel on display, the seller frowned until she saw Minerva hover over his shoulder permissively.

“Oh, are you his mother?,” she asked, pleased. 

“No, I’m—,” but tired from a heavy lunch and thinking of grasping, Minerva forgot herself. 

The seller was pretty, in a persnickety way. She stood older than Minerva and dressed younger, in a snug, powder pink sweater vest, her wide collar showing perfumed collarbone upon which rested a dainty pearl strung on a delicate gold chain. The seller’s silver-streaked blond hair cut in a bob to her chin looked styled from a salon Minerva would hardly know, as she plaited her thick and hardly wavy hair herself every evening.

If this woman wore lipstick, it matched the peachy blush of her up-curling lips, wondering politely. 

_Minnie, mind your manners!_

The professor stepped back and cleared her throat, pushing her own glasses up the bridge of her nose. Still over-warm from the restaurant and the walk here, she coughed, “N-no—no, not at all. I’m his temporary guardian.”

“I’m being kidnapped. Call the police.” The seller proved more unsure of Severus mumbling this while skimming the new arrivals unbothered, than of Minerva waving away her discomfort. 

“He’s joking,” she reassured the woman, who looked to her with very blue eyes. Caught off guard, Minerva frowned. The seller was clearly shocked by her sudden disapproval and stammered to fix things.

“I, w-well, we, erm—!”

Minerva stayed her with a hand. “He just needs something to keep his interest. If you could please.”

“I can help you with anything specific you’ll be looking for,” she offered hastily. A manicured hand floated to her sweatered chest, clutching her pearl. “However, I _am_ sorry, but if you don’t intend to buy—.”

“We’re just reading the titles,” Severus sneered. Oh, Minerva had forgotten for a moment that he existed, just a moment. She was dwelling on the neat crease of this woman’s flared pants. “It’s a bookstore. We’re not allowed to read?”

“Don’t be _rude,”_ the professor nipped. Too quick, she batted his hands from the display, knowing they still smelled of spices and were much too stained. She hadn’t made him wash them, it slipping her mind that such things needed telling. 

She heard her own mother _tsk_ in her mind. Often but less as she’d aged, her impression of the retired governess, stern old Isobel Ross, could appear at her shoulder to give much needed correction.

As much as she missed her mother, the witch tensed and felt the tug on her wandering thoughts, finding them tethered to a place so deep in her that if she looked down, the link vanished. She stood on a cliff, trying to follow a dingy come in from a distance, until it passed under her ledge into an unseen cave below and existed only in memories moving too far underfoot.

_Minnie! Goodness, child, pay attention!_

Herding her stray bits, Minerva asked into her student’s ear, “Are you actually interested in this book, or have you just decided to be difficult?”

“I was only meaning to read the jacket,” he defended, Northern accent slipping through. Upset. “That’s illegal now?”

“Not at all.” 

She swept the novel from under his questing fingers, flipping it open to read the summary herself. Nothing too bawdy or grotesque, only a murder mystery, which from his yawn under her narrow gaze, she was sure would bore him to tears. Hopefully, even to sleep. She grabbed it and its sequel stacked beside it on the display table.

“I didn’t want that one,” he complained.

“Tough.” She handed them to the woman, avoiding her eye, glad to have a purchase to show for all her—strangeness. “We’ll take these.”

They left with him carrying a bag of books, and her, a magazine: _Woman and Home._ It’d sit forgotten on the hotel desk, unread. She only bought it stumbling over the need to have her own purposes, and so she pretended it’d provide an idea for her next steps. The smiling homemaker on the cover looked to know a thing about waiting. 

But returned to the inn, the books and the meal did drag Severus back into sleep. This left her hours as the day’s blood pooled, reddening the light throughout her room. 

She fought it with the myriad electric lamps, battling fiddly switches, plugging a few in, afraid for her fingers in case the sockets could bite. She contemplated a shower but couldn’t stand the thought of undressing, too restless in her skin to bare it, even to no one.

She laid out clothes for the next day, Muggle ones: an umber tweed skirt and a stark white blouse. Itch unscratched, she laid out robes: deep green, nearly black. Side by side, they were two comparable women, the real flesh of them wicked into the well-made bed. Hardly slept in.

Minerva sat as if to pen another letter, parchment untouched. She paced as well, from the window to the door, a knuckle pressed to her lips—between her lips—gripped in her teeth. Her footsteps—flat shoes, stockinged feet, walking boots next—were so discordant, so wrong for what she needed to hear from the root of her hitting the carpet again and again. 

She left her room, casting alarms for any movement in or out of the boy’s. Taking the corridor in long, hurried strides from end to end did nothing to set her right. 

Cokeworth sunk in as the red deepened outside.

Even as she left the inn and the street it adorned for the cracked sidewalks under her toe pads, hard from wandering, dull claws flexing in her feet—even as she snuck off past where even rogue teachers went, past where she worried about her student, through the text and letters of incidents into a wild, she felt full on waiting. Sick of it.

She wanted an answer, even just one. She sought out relief. A crow cackled and she snapped to it, pupils swelling. The yowl always borne in her reached out, scaring a mouse from the underbrush, and she picked up speed, more animal than before. Finally, moving rattled her restlessness. 

Feral cats moved unseen in the evening croak, hardly making shapes in the dark. Orange afternoon bruised into twilight, and silent paws alighted once again on the garden wall. Feline ears twitched, irritated by flies visiting sloppy, wet vegetables dumped in the yard. A shower shushed overhead, panting steam and stringent soap fumes; lye; tea tree, verbena. 

Bedding hung from a clothesline, one wooden peg across three of them. A man-shaped stain—torso and a loose interpretation of limbs—haunted the fitted, top sheet, and quilt, the ghost shrinking from far to near as they opposed a feeble breeze. Like the same man soaked through them to a bare mattress.

Her nose stung. She smelled bleach. Upstairs, the shower squeaked off and, damning the itch, Minerva climbed into the open kitchen window. The glass flashed dark against the awfully hungry glint in her yellow eyes.

Landing on the counter, tail lashing, she smelled the steam and heard it happen: the nauseous groan; the creak.

* * *

Eileen woke up hot and suffocated, nerves scraped to tingling and deafened by a hiss. Peeling her lids open and seeing white, she froze solid, shot through with terror of having gone blind. The Dark magic—but no—the white parted and stratified, revealing the black grout and soaked shag bath mat beside her upstairs shower. 

Right, she had sloughed out of bed sharing her husband’s sweat. Eileen couldn’t recall a single thought she had in rolling the limp man over and working the bedclothes out from under him.

Had she washed them? She tried to remember...no. 

She had filled the tub with whatever lined the bathroom windowsill. They turned the water tan. Dunking the sheets in it did nothing but wet them and erase the stink, and she hung them outside like that, her own self sodden to the waist from churning the water. 

Then, once the tub drained, she swayed listening to water moan through their rusting pipes, hands burning. And, realizing she left the spout running for an hour at least, she pulled the pin and started the knocking of shower rain in the walls.

It pissed down so river cold when she stuck out her chemical hands. It shook her loose.

 _I miss swimming,_ was the first thought Eileen had had in hours. _They had a river, my parents’ friends did. On their land in the country. I walked in it sometimes._

As a young girl, swimming was gathering her hem in her arms until her bloomers showed. But on her own, no one would see. She hid well. The quiet Prince could wade out to her hips and wait until they felt numb and she shivered, glancing back at her shoes on the riverbank left on a rock to keep out of mud. 

 _I forgot,_ she realized. 

One time, in checking on her shoes, she saw the man unbuttoning his waistcoat. It wasn’t Tobias then. Later, it was her husband, and she wasn’t swimming when he found her. She was sitting on a bench on a train platform, gripping her luggage, potions sick. Looking at the sludgy river, murky green from factory runoff, it was something she could never want to step in but, to see it, already felt in it over her head.

It sloshed as she drank it in.

_“Afternoon, miss,” said gruffly, waiting and serious. Like he’d watched her for a while before saying hello. “S’there somewhere you’re meaning to be?”_

Still, the drumming and hiss of hot water beat her back, hot as it got in their house. So, enough to ache. She sighed, uncomfortable, armpits and elbows sore from however long spent propped on the edge of the ceramic tub. Eileen heaved and dropped a massive breath like to reinflate her chest, pressed flat from napping against the tub wall.

Throwing out an arm, she fumbled for a moment and shut off the steamy pour. 

“I’m fine,” she grunted aloud, to the room maybe, just to hear it. Her voice echoed off the tile. She sounded loud, unavoidably so, and winced. “No more.”

“Where are you, _devil_ _whore!?”_

Ah, she thought she killed him. Eileen had done nothing about it but wash the sheets and shower, craving quenching, but still. Assuming the house was hers now, she meant to soak until water rotted the second floor and she fell through it. 

“What’ve you _done to me!?,”_ her husband sobbed, sounded closer, and floorboards creaked. 

Slow feet shuffled and Eileen sunk back into the full bath, pushing waves of wet onto the floor. Without the steam, the witch sat naked, loosed hair stuck to her face, shoulders, breasts—to her stomach, to her birthing scars. When was it last cut? It looked like seaweed floating in the milky bath.

She shepherded soap bubbles, unfeeling, listening to Tobias knock things over and swear, choked with her and tears. Without knowing she expected it, Tobias lumbered past the barricaded bathroom door, and she followed his slice of shadow as it passed over the jamb, eyelids heavy. 

“You bitch!” A clatter and bang through the wall shared by their son’s empty room. Drawers, tossed. A hollow thud. “EVIL BITCH!”

Eileen held her breath and slid until the water kissed her bottom lashes. Closing her eyes, welcoming the dizzy black, floating in her body for the first time in years, she was stripped. Pruned? Peeled? 

She opened her eyes with the squeak of the bathroom door hinges. Maybe the word was “clean.”

Inch by inch, the glimpse of hallway waxed to an entrance sized for ushering in a slim destruction. She suffered a spasm of fear drugged by her dead woman’s hum. The trampling, likely over the absent boy’s books. Toby’s pounding feet like boots pummeling the splintering wood floors. The door nudged the shore of blocks and half-full jugs of cleaner, conjured doorstops angled horribly and still giving up space.

_“Great aunt up by where? Aw, that’s miles from here, miss. This here is Cokeworth. Rail only comes once, maybe twice a day.”_

_The factory man had stubble, already salt and pepper despite his age. He wasn’t too much older than her. He didn’t smile much, but he carried her bags. His only cologne was cigarettes, machine oil and coffee. He offered to drive her to the next station to catch her train._

_She didn’t smile back, and he seemed alright with it._

_“Took me a second to figure you wasn’t a ghost, sat there all still like that. What’s your name then?”_

The creature on her threshold was a cat, simply that. A grey-striped tabby with marks like glasses around its smart little eyes. Suppressed terror broke on her startled hiss what raised its hackles, chasing it back into the door it nosed open. Its haunches shut it with an audible _chuck_. 

And so followed Tobias, having fallen silent to wheeze and no doubt hearing her splash in the bath, sputtering, alive with burning bilge gasped into her lungs in shock. Eileen stood, pouring water down her body and onto the floor, smacking her chest. Bath water dribbled from her mouth and nose when she hacked, cursing, snorting soap. 

She nearly drowned without noticing. Legs weak—

_“Eileen? That’s a nice name.”_

“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

Her feet shot out from under her. She slipped and reached for anything—the sink, the naked towel rail. Tangled in the shower curtain, wet nylon clung to her warm, bruise-painted arms, wrapped and pinned to her chest, striped by fingers like the cat by grey; and, in a flash, she predicted the blow from the tub’s lip. She already felt the snap, heard the crack.

Whirling, spinning black gripped her and squeezed her to nothing—and then she landed drenched on a carpet, gathered into someone’s chest. 

Someone taller than her by enough for her ear to hit their trembling chin. Someone stronger than her enough to hold her arched back off the carpet, saving her bruises although, perhaps without meaning to, squeezing them too terribly. It hurt. And the someone was heavy. 

“Damn! Merlin, damn, bloody _shite!”_ Someone was a woman. Eileen recognized the brogue from leagues down through the river water wobbling in her ears.

_“You can’t be going back?!”_

_“I—think it would be best if you left with us.”_

_“Your son…”_

_“Good morning, Mrs. Snape. My name is Minerva McGonagall. I’m your son’s professor from school. There’s been a rather unfortunate incident, and if you’d be so kind as to let me inside, I’ll of course explain in full detail...Pardon?”_

Eileen went rigid and hit the carpet when dropped as unceremoniously as she was whisked away. She lay left to watch the professor’s bootheels disappear behind the en-suite’s bathroom door with the click. 

Coughed up wet on the ground, she blinked slowly, slowly, confounded.

 _Why this?,_ she wondered, and for the first time, wondered also: what had she planned for after? Just after. If she buried him, if he kicked down the door—after that?

She did just as well lying on a carpet, better even. Better, especially. 

Curling up on her side, she panted, hurt and alive and confused by the warm lamplight and a woman’s sobbing not her own.

* * *

Minerva only meant to catch her. She saw her slip and meant to grab her before her head hit the tile. The screaming rankled her, and the moment they touched, she threw them toward the last image in her mind: her clothes laid out on the Tabby’s bedspread, the ochre wardrobe and the curtains, and the wounded afternoon.

 _“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU.”_ She shook to her bones. 

Working in law enforcement for a time, she left it when her cases wound down to rowdy teens and domestics. It was hard to expect she had done any good when revisiting the same homes two, three, four times to no avail.

Nothing improved without the other help: friends, a place to stay, money saved, often medicine, a place for children and little siblings and pets and even precious keepsakes. So many things were always needed beyond her in any authority, managing a room, teaching adults to _be—_ sometimes for the first time in their lives. 

She would rather teach children and send them on their way. Moving the awful, helping _,_ happened more easily in a school where she could measure how well her teachings were received. Reward or otherwise as needed. Soothe tiny, homesick hearts with warm milk and a nod. 

Sure, yes, there were other Severus Snapes. There were other Eileen Snapes, most definitely. 

_“EVIL BITCH!”_

_Stealth came from being low to the ground, low enough to be kicked or trampled. Darting out of sight into rooms, tiny heart thudding louder than the stamping feet—_

Minerva cleaned herself up after too few minutes spent crying. Odd, but she never felt so flappable as when seeing the portrait living had made of Eileen Snape’s back, of Severus’s arms, of the house of broken things. Pictures and dishes murdered on the ground and likely forgotten, stumbled around and stomped on, to blame for more horror in as inanimate a way as a can of beer. 

She saw him destroy his son’s bedroom, ripping it open in search of a boy thankfully stolen away. There was more family in a class year than that house, like more in this inn, even, like more between her and her student asleep in the room over than _there_ while his father sought revenge and his mother recovered on Minerva‘s floor.

 _Knock!_ A sharp rap shot through her sniffling. 

“Yes, one minute, please!,” she answered.  Minerva hurried to splash her face in the tap, letting it drip dry. “One— _dammit._ Coming! I’m—sorry, I—!”

She lost her grip on her wand, which bounced into the sink and which she grabbed, swearing, new tears stinging in her eyes. Another knock came.

 _I don’t want to,_ loudly cried some small, senseless thing.

She whipped open the door, flushed and glasses askew. Her eyes were swollen from rubbing, so it took a moment to see Severus’s mother beyond a blur of person and the veil of long, wet hair. She stood hovering with a blank expression and her fist raised to knock again. 

Blind, Minerva offered a hand.

* * *

Just as blindly, Eileen gave her fist. Cold knuckles curled in a clammy palm. One woman shivered newborn and nude cold, maybe also from shock, but she stared so darkly, so steadily that the anxious, crying beast in the other woman hushed. And passed over each, a shudder of goose feet on graves. 


End file.
